Workiva acquires OneCloud to expand data integrations for business reporting

Cloud-based business reporting platform Workiva has acquired iPaaS (integration platform-as-a-service) provider OneCloud. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Founded in 2008, companies such as Google, Slack, and Delta Air Lines use Workiva to connect disparate data from across their documents, spreadsheets, and presentations to serve automated and contextual reports to managers, shareholders, regulators, or anyone else concerned with a company’s compliance and governance. Moreover, the data always remains connected, so if the data is tweaked at its source, it’s also changed at the destination.

The publicly traded company had performed fairly modestly since its 2014 IPO, but as with just about every cloud-focused business, Workiva has benefited from pandemic-driven digital transformation, with its valuation roughly quadrupling over the past 18 months.

Unified

OneCloud is a four-year-old company that enterprises use to integrate and unify data from thousands of applications across on-premises or cloud infrastructure, allowing businesses to generate insights by pooling and exchanging data from different apps.

Above: OneCloud dashboard

OneCloud represents Workiva’s first acquisition in its 13-year history, and the deal extends Workiva’s platform deeper into the enterprise, with added capabilities for connecting data from systems. These include enterprise resource planning (ERP); governance, risk, and compliance (GRC); human capital management (HCM); and customer relationship management (CRM).

Workiva and OneCloud have in fact worked in close partnership since 2019, when Workiva announced it would not only be leveraging OneCloud’s technology as part of its own cloud platform, but also making a direct (undisclosed) financial investment in the startup.

So given the complementary nature of their respective platforms and Workiva’s existing shareholder status, a direct acquisition makes a great deal of sense — especially at a time when digital transformation is permeating just about every industry.

“Digital transformations continue to accelerate at a rapid pace,” Workiva CEO Marty Vanderploeg said in a press release. “Teams across the enterprise must quickly harmonize, simplify, and control data, both financial and non-financial, from disparate source systems. The acquisition of OneCloud enables just that.”