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Workday, Inc., is an American on‑demand (cloud-based) financial management and human capital management software vendor. It offers business solutions by Enterprise Cloud Applications like Financial Management, HCM, Analytics & Reporting, Enterprise Planning, and others. Workday was founded by David Duffield, founder and former CEO of ERP company PeopleSoft, and former PeopleSoft chief strategist Aneel Bhusri following Oracle’s hostile takeover of PeopleSoft in 2005.
According to the founders, their curiosity led them to create something new—a finance, HR, analytics, and planning system that evolves as business evolves, and a company that’s out to do right by employees, customers, and the world.
Workday – Company Highlights
| Startup Name | Workday, Inc. |
|---|---|
| Headquarters | Pleasanton, California, U.S. |
| Industry | Software , Cloud Computing |
| Founded | March 2005 |
| Founders | Aneel Bhusri and David Duffield |
| Services | Software, Recruiting, Human Resources |
| CEO | Aneel Bhusri |
| Total Valuation | US$ 3.63 billion (As of 2019) |
| Area Served | Worldwide |
| Website | www.workday.com |
Workday – About and How it Works?
Workday – Recent News
Workday – Logo
Workday – Founder and History
Workday – Mission
Workday – Business Model
Workday – Revenue and Growth
Workday – Funding and Investors
Workday – Investments
Workday – Acquisitions
Workday – Competitors
Workday – Challenges Faced
Workday – Future Plans
Workday – FAQs
Workday – About and How it Works?
Workday, Inc. is a provider of enterprise cloud applications for finance and human resources. The Company delivers financial management, human capital management and analytics applications designed for various companies, educational institutions and government agencies.
As part of its applications, the Company provides embedded analytics that capture the content and context of everyday business events, facilitating informed decision-making from wherever users are working. Its applications include Workday Finance Management, Workday Human Capital Management (HCM) and Other Applications.
It also provides open, standards-based Web-services application programming interfaces, and pre-built packaged integrations and connectors. Workday Financial Management is a unified application with a range of financial capabilities, relevant analytics and metrics, and auditable process management. Workday HCM allows an organization to staff, pay, organize and develop its global workforce.
Workday – Recent News
As of January 2021, Workday launched COVID-19 Vaccine Management Solution to Enable Organizations to Protect and Support their Workforce.
With a customer community representing more than 45 million workers, Workday is supporting global organizations as they manage their people and finances throughout the pandemic. The vaccine management solution expands on the Workday Return to Workplace offering and helps enable organizations to securely access worker immunization insight, plan return to workplace scenarios, support worker well-being, and establish new operating models to adapt as vaccines become available. In addition, Workday offers customers configurability to control and securely manage the data and protect their employees’ privacy.
Workday – Logo
Workday logo has a sunrise symbol and Workday text. In its entirety, the logo lockup projects the Workday brand.
Workday – Founder and History
In 2005, software visionaries Aneel Bhusri and David Duffield, Workday Founders, met at the Jax Truckee Diner outside of Lake Tahoe in California. They decided to form a startup – One that would sell cloud based applications for finance and HR. The two long term friends had plenty of experience.
Dave had founded PeopleSoft in 1987 and served as the company CEO and chairman of the board. Aneel had held a number of leadership positions at PeopleSoft, including senior Vice President of product strategy. On that day in 2005, they resolved to build a company that would revolutionize the enterprise Software market. The result is Workday.
Workday was founded in March 2005 and launched in November 2006. Initially, it was funded by Duffield and venture capital firm Greylock Partners. In December 2008, Workday moved its headquarters from Walnut Creek, California to Pleasanton, California, where PeopleSoft founder Duffield’s prior company, was located.
Workday – Mission
Workday’s mission statement says, “To bringing passion and customer focus to the business of enterprise applications.”
Workday – Business Model
Workday’s business model entails designing and developing software and maintaining its cloud-based platform for customers.
Workday makes money by selling subscriptions to its services rather than selling the software outright. Expenses are booked up front when it signs on a new customer but the associated revenue is recognized over the life of multiyear agreements. In first quarter 2016, Workday announced annual revenue in excess of $1 billion for the first time ever in fiscal year 2016.
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Workday – Revenue and Growth
| Year | Amount | Percentage Change From Last Year |
|---|---|---|
| 2020 | $3.627B | +28.52%% |
| 2019 | $2.822B | +31.69% |
| 2018 | $2.143B | +36.12% |
Workday – Funding and Investors
Workday has raised a total of $230.6M in funding over 6 rounds. Workday funding was raised on Oct 24, 2011 from a Series F round. Workday is funded by 8 investors. Janus Capital Group and Morgan Stanley are the most recent investors.
| Date | Round | Amount | Lead Investors |
|---|---|---|---|
| Oct 24, 2011 | Series F | $85M | Bezos Expeditions, Janus Capital Group, Morgan Stanley, T. Rowe Price |
| Apr 29, 2009 | Series E | $75M | New Enterprise Associates |
| Sep 5, 2007 | Series B | $20.3M | – |
| Jan 19, 2007 | Series B | $20M | – |
| Dec 28, 2006 | Series A | $15.3M | – |
| May 17, 2005 | Series A | $15M | – |
Workday – Investments
Workday has made 5 investments. Their most recent investment was on Jan 22, 2020, when tealbook raised $5M.
| Date | Organization Name | Round | Amount |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jan 22, 2020 | Tealbook | Seed Round | $5M |
| Oct 18, 2017 | Duo Security | Series D | $70M |
| Mar 2, 2016 | Landit | Seed Round | $5.9M |
| Jun 16, 2015 | Tidemark | Series F | $25M |
| Dec 17, 2013 | Datameer | Series D | $19M |
Workday – Acquisitions
Workday has acquired 14 organizations. Their most recent acquisition was Scout RFP on Nov 4, 2019. They acquired Scout RFP for $540M.
| Acquiree Name | Date | Amount | About Acquiree |
|---|---|---|---|
| Scout RFP | Nov 4, 2019 | $540M | Scout RFP is an innovative e-sourcing solution for companies in all industries. |
| Trusted Key | Jul 18, 2019 | – | Trusted Key provides consumers and organizations with a secure digital identity solution. |
| Stories | Jul 17, 2018 | – | Stories automates data analysis using graph AI. It delivers 50x faster analysis and personalised insights worth ~20% of revenue. |
| Workday Adaptover Planning | Jun 11, 2018 | $1.6B | Workday Adaptive Planning is powering a new generation of business planning with the Business Planning Cloud. |
| Rallyteam | Jun 8, 2018 | – | Rallyteam provides an internal mobility platform that enables companies to better understand and utilize their people. |
| SkipFlag | Jan 16, 2018 | – | A knowledge base that builds itself. |
| Pattern | Jul 24, 2017 | – | Pattern is an intelligent workspace that eliminates grunt work so you can spend more time on what matters — your customers |
| Platfora | Jul 21, 2016 | – | Platfora offers a big data analytics platform helping companies get insights into the events, actions and norm times of their business. |
| Zaption | Jun 30, 2016 | – | Zaption’s publishing platform turns passive video into active learning experiences. |
| MediaCore | Sep 29, 2015 | – | MediaCore provides a solution that enables educational institutes to capture media, build a media library and store content. |
Workday – Competitors
The top 10 competitors in Workday’s competitive set are SAP, Oracle, Ultimate Software, ADP, Ceridian, Microsoft, Anaplan, Infor, Epicor, Sage.
Workday – Challenges Faced
As a company expands across geographies and product lines, it becomes more challenging to consistently assess and report on performance, putting management at greater risk of making the wrong decisions. The same happened with Workday. Workday Financial Management is the company’s foray into a much larger, yet more competitive, market.
The total addressable market for financials is estimated to be $27 billion. The company has also begun providing financial and human-resource analytics tools that have a market potential of $19 billion. The company has shown early success in these markets, but it will need to continue to win customers and take market share for the stock to be a success going forward.
Sarika Anand
Workday – Future Plans
“All of us are counting on technology getting cheaper to get to profitability. We’re not thinking that we’re going to need to raise prices 50 percent to get to profitability,” Aneel Bhusri said.
“All the [cloud] companies are now in high growth mode. As they get into slower growth mode where a lot of the customers are just renewing after their three-year contract is up and you don’t apply any sales and marketing costs, those customers become a lot more profitable.”
According to the CEO, right now the team is more focused on the revenue growth and they’re investing for that growth. Bhusri said there’s still considerable scope for the firm to expand across the globe, with the point where there might be a dwindling supply of new customers still far in the future. For the moment Workday’s expansion remains impressive but Bhusri suggests it’s worth looking at the growth figures in detail.
Workday – FAQs
What does Workday do?
Workday is a provider of enterprise cloud applications for finance and human resources. The Company delivers financial management, human capital management (HCM), and analytics applications designed for various companies, educational institutions and government agencies.
Who founded Workday?
Aneel Bhusri and David Duffield founded Workday.
What is a Workday profile ?
Your Workday profile contains basic information about you and can be viewed by other employees.
What companies do Workday compete with?
The top 10 Workday competitors are SAP, Oracle, Ultimate Software, ADP, Ceridian, Microsoft, Anaplan, Infor, Epicor, Sage.
How does Workday make money?
Workday makes money by selling subscriptions to its services rather than selling the software outright. Expenses are booked up front when it signs on a new customer but the associated revenue is recognized over the life of multiyear agreements.
Megha Rani