Google LLC scored another key customer win for its cloud business today with the news that it’s partnering with Workday Inc., the financial and human capital management software provider.

The deal sees Google become a preferred cloud partner for Workday across core industries such as financial services, healthcare and retail, with Google Cloud hosting those apps and ensuring ease of use and low network latency.

The strategic partnership will give Workday’s customers more choice to meet their business needs, the companies said. They’ll be able to deploy Workday Financial Management, Workday Human Capital Management and Workday Adaptive Planning directly on Google’s cloud infrastructure.

Being chosen by Workday as a preferred cloud provider is a potentially huge win for Google, as Workday is said to have more than 8,000 customers globally and more than 50 million users within that base.

That said, the news comes with an interesting caveat. Last month it was revealed by The Register that one of those customers, Amazon Web Services Inc., no less, had dropped Workday in favor of alternative Oracle Corp. software, reportedly because it had problems scaling up the company’s platform across its 1.3 million-person global workforce.

Workday didn’t admit to the scaling problem, but it did own up to the fact that Amazon is no longer a customer, saying the companies had “mutually agreed to discontinue Amazon’s Workday Human Capital Management deployment.” Workday said the decision was taken more than a year and a half ago because Amazon had a “unique set of needs that are different from what we’re delivering for our broader customer base.”

The announcement really set the cat among the pigeons as Workday’s stock lost more than 7%.

Amazon later contacted The Register to reiterate that some of its teams are still using Workday. “A number of significant teams within Amazon continue to use Workday,” it said. “Others have specific requirements based on their unique businesses. The partnership between the two companies remains strong.”

Unfortunately for Workday, Amazon isn’t the only customer to have experienced problems running its software. Earlier this year, another key user, the State of Maine, said it was ordering an official review of a $54.6 million contract to renew its HR system using Workday’s software. State officials said the company showed “no accountability” for its role in a flawed project to replace its existing 30-year-old mainframe system, a project that has so far missed two launch dates.

It remains to be seen if Google can help Workday to address the apparent scalability problems it has suffered from. Google Cloud Chief Executive Thomas Kurian voiced confidence. “By running Workday on Google Cloud, organizations can adhere to commercial data requirements, while maintaining the enterprise-grade security, scalability, and performance they expect from a trusted cloud leader like Google,” he said in a statement today.

Analyst Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. told SiliconANGLE how Workday has a long history of selecting cloud providers to hawk its platform on, beginning with IBM, which it used for its development and test environments.

“Software-as-a-service platform providers like Workday are prime customers for Infrastructure-as-a-service companies like Google and Amazon as they bring lots of uniform workloads to their clouds, and that is key to their economies of scale,” Mueller said. “So it’s clear why Google is interested in running Workday’s platform on its cloud.”

On the other hand, Mueller said for Workday, the question of which cloud it runs on should be a matter of choice. It’s positioning itself as a kind of “Switzerland” in terms of letting its customers choose their ideal cloud platform, he said. “That is the right approach as automation and data gravity force enterprises onto specific clouds, so it makes sense for the SaaS vendors to follow.”

Looking ahead, Google and Workday said they plan to expand their partnership by creating joint strategic go-to-market programs that will include co-marketing activities and co-selling activities to increase awareness of Workday’s offerings on Google Cloud.

“Together, we’re uniquely positioned to deliver industry-leading cloud capabilities so organizations can enhance workforce productivity and accelerate their digital transformations,” said Workday co-CEO Chano Fernandez.

Image: Workday