Workday - Bringing Customer Focus to the Business of Enterprise Applications

Workday - Bringing Customer Focus to the Business of Enterprise Applications

Company Profile is an initiative by StartupTalky to publish verified information on different startups and organizations. The content in this post has been approved by the organization it is based on.

Workday, Inc., is an American on‑demand (cloud-based) financial management and human capital management software vendor. 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, and planning system that evolves as business evolves, and a company that’s out to do right by employees, customers, and the world. Know more about the journey and company profile of workday here in this article.

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 Financial 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 has a sunrise symbol and Workday text. In its entirety, the logo lockup projects the Workday brand.

Workday - Bringing Customer Focus to the Business of Enterprise Applications

Workday - Founder and History

Workday - Bringing Customer Focus to the Business of Enterprise Applications
workday founder

In 2005, software visionaries Aneel Bhusri and David Duffield 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 - Bringing Customer Focus to the Business of Enterprise Applications

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 - Bringing Customer Focus to the Business of Enterprise Applications

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. Their latest 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.


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Workday - Bringing Customer Focus to the Business of Enterprise Applications

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 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.


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Workday - Bringing Customer Focus to the Business of Enterprise Applications


Author: Sarika Anand

Source : https://startuptalky.com/workday-success-story/


Date : 2021-04-04T08:42:00.000Z

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