In the meantime, Workday is looking to build out its partner ecosystem. Workday currently has 25 partners covering areas such as system integration, recruiting, talent management and subscription billing, but hopes to increase that number to 60 by the end of 2012, according to Bhusri.

One of Workday's highest-profile partnerships is with fellow cloud vendor Salesforce.com.

On Tuesday, Bhusri described how Workday 15 integrates the system with Salesforce.com's Chatter enterprise social-networking service. The combination will result in secure, "socially enabled business processes," he said. For example, if a number of executives want to use the system to discuss a possible company reorganization, measures will be in place to ensure only authorized people can chime in, he said.

Other new features include an integration with Microsoft Outlook; a series of talent-management enhancements including a Career Interests module that allows employees to "express their career goals and aspirations [and] explore jobs within their company"; a connector to third-party payroll systems; and improved financial analytics.

Overall, Workday's strategy is clicking and larger rivals may have reason to be worried, according to one expert.