Workday, Inc., is an American on‑demand (

cloud In meteorology, a cloud is an aerosol consisting of a visible mass of miniature liquid droplets, frozen crystals, or other particles suspended in the atmosphere of a planetary body or similar space. Water or various other chemicals may ...

-based)

financial management Financial management is the business function concerned with profitability, expenses, cash and credit, so that the "organization may have the means to carry out its objective as satisfactorily as possible;" the latter often defined as maximizin ...

human capital management Humans (''Homo sapiens'') are the most abundant and widespread species of primate, characterized by bipedalism and exceptional cognitive skills due to a large and complex brain. This has enabled the development of advanced tools, culture, an ...

and Student information system software vendor. Workday was founded by David Duffield, founder and former CEO of ERP company

PeopleSoft PeopleSoft, Inc. is a company that provides human resource management systems (HRMS), Financial Management Solutions (FMS), supply chain management (SCM), customer relationship management (CRM), and enterprise performance management (EPM) software ...

, along with former PeopleSoft chief strategist Aneel Bhusri, following Oracle's acquisition of PeopleSoft in 2005. In October 2012, Workday launched a successful IPO (

initial public offering An initial public offering (IPO) or stock launch is a public offering in which shares of a company are sold to institutional investors and usually also to retail (individual) investors. An IPO is typically underwritten by one or more investme ...

) that valued the company at $9.5 billion. Competitors of Workday include SAP Successfactors,

Ceridian Ceridian HCM is an American provider of human resources software and services with employees in the USA, Canada, Europe, Australia and Mauritius. It is a publicly traded company on the New York Stock Exchange. History Ceridian is a descenda ...

and Oracle. In 2020, '' Fortune'' magazine ranked Workday Inc. at number five on their Fortune List of the Top 100 Companies to Work For in 2020 based on an employee survey of satisfaction. San Francisco Business Times ranked Workday at number two on their Best Places to Work in the Bay in the largest companies category.

History

Workday was founded in March 2005 and launched in November 2006. Initially, it was funded by Duffield and venture capital firm

Greylock Partners Greylock Partners is one of the oldest venture capital firms, founded in 1965, with committed capital of over $3.5 billion under management. The firm focuses on early-stage companies in the consumer, enterprise software and infrastructure as wel ...

. In December 2008, Workday moved its headquarters from

Walnut Creek, California Walnut Creek is a city in Contra Costa County, California, United States, located in the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area, about east of the city of Oakland. With a total population of 70,127 per the 2020 census, Walnut Creek s ...

, to

Pleasanton, California Pleasanton is a city in Alameda County, California, United States. Located in the Amador Valley, it is a suburb in the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area. The population was 79,871 at the 2020 census. In 2005 and 2007, Pleasanton wa ...

, where PeopleSoft founder Duffield's prior company was located. On February 6, 2008, Workday announced that it had reached a definitive agreement to purchase Cape Clear Software. In May 2008, Workday signed a large contract with

Flextronics Flex Ltd. (previously known as Flextronics International Ltd. or Flextronics) is an American Singaporean-domiciled multinational diversified manufacturing company. It is the third largest global electronics manufacturing services (EMS), origi ...

to provide human capital management software services. Companies that have publicly disclosed contracts or deployments of Workday include Aviva, Chiquita Brands, and other firms. On April 29, 2009, Workday announced that it secured $75 million in funding led by

New Enterprise Associates New Enterprise Associates (NEA) is an American-based venture capital firm. NEA focuses investment stages ranging from seed stage through growth stage across an array of industry sectors. With ~$25 billion in committed capital, NEA is one of the w ...

. Existing investors Greylock Partners and Workday CEO and co‑founder Dave Duffield also participated in the round. On October 24, 2011, Workday announced $85 million in new funding, bringing total capital raised to $250 million. Investors in the latest round included T. Rowe Price,

Morgan Stanley Morgan Stanley is an American multinational investment management and financial services company headquartered at 1585 Broadway in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. With offices in more than 41 countries and more than 75,000 employees, the fir ...

Investment Management, Janus, and

Bezos Expeditions Bezos Expeditions is an American investment firm based in Mercer Island, Washington. It serves as a family office for Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos by managing his personal investments. The firm invests in early stage ventures, late stage venture ...

. As of spring 2012, Workday had 310 customers, ranging from mid-sized businesses to ''Fortune'' 500 companies. In October 2012, Workday launched its

(IPO) on the

New York Stock Exchange The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE, nicknamed "The Big Board") is an American stock exchange in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan in New York City. It is by far the world's largest stock exchange by market capitalization of its listed ...

with

ticker symbol A ticker symbol or stock symbol is an abbreviation used to uniquely identify publicly traded shares of a particular stock on a particular stock market. In short, ticker symbols are arrangements of symbols or characters (generally Latin letters ...

WDAY. Its shares were priced at $28 and ended trading Friday, October 12, at $48.69, "propelled the start-up to a market capitalization of nearly $9.5 billion including unexercised stock options." It sold 22.75 million Class A shares, raising $637 million. The IPO raised more cash than any launch in the U.S. technology sector since

Facebook Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Mosk ...

's $16 billion IPO in May 2012. Its shares surged 74% in their IPO, underscoring investor interest in

cloud computing Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage ( cloud storage) and computing power, without direct active management by the user. Large clouds often have functions distributed over mu ...

. In 2016 Workday launched a cloud-based Student information system to augment its portfolio of financial management and human capital management products. In 2018 Workday acquired Filip Doušek's company Stories.bi. The co-CEO of Workday is Aneel Bhusri, who is a partner with

and handled senior leadership positions earlier in his career at PeopleSoft. In 2020, Chano Fernandez was promoted to co-CEO. Dave Duffield served as the chairman of the board until his resignation in April 2022, after which Aneel Bhusri took over as the chairman. In November 2021, Workdays announced its acquisition of VNDLY, startup that helps companies manage external workforce personnel, for $510 million. Sequoia Capital's Carl Eschenbach replaced Fernandez as co-CEO in December 2022. The company also announced that Eschenbach would become its sole CEO after January 2024, when Bhusri will move to the role of executive chair.

Business model

Workday makes money by selling subscriptions to its services rather than selling the software outright.

Expense An expense is an item requiring an outflow of money, or any form of Wealth, fortune in general, to another person or group as payment for an item, service, or other category of costs. For a leasehold estate, tenant, renting, rent is an expense. Fo ...

s are booked up front when it signs on a new customer but the associated

revenue In accounting, revenue is the total amount of income generated by the sale of goods and services related to the primary operations of the business. Commercial revenue may also be referred to as sales or as turnover. Some companies receive reven ...

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.

Corporate governance

Duffield holds voting rights to Workday shares that were worth $3.4 billion and Bhusri held rights to shares valued at $1.3 billion. Collectively, they hold 67% of the company's voting shares. This voting structure makes the event of a

hostile takeover In business, a takeover is the purchase of one company (the ''target'') by another (the ''acquirer'' or ''bidder''). In the UK, the term refers to the acquisition of a public company whose shares are listed on a stock exchange, in contrast to t ...

much less likely.

Product

Workday has released 39 updates to its product line as of September, 2022, its most recent being "2022 R2". It releases a major update every 6 months, every September and March Workday operates data centers located in Ashburn, Virginia;

Lithia Springs, Georgia Lithia Springs () is a census-designated place and unincorporated area, formerly incorporated as a city, located in northeastern Douglas County, Georgia, United States. As of the 2020 census, the community had a population of 16,644. The area is ...

;

Portland, Oregon Portland (, ) is a port city in the Pacific Northwest and the list of cities in Oregon, largest city in the U.S. state of Oregon. Situated at the confluence of the Willamette River, Willamette and Columbia River, Columbia rivers, Portland is ...

; Dublin, Ireland;

Amsterdam, Netherlands Amsterdam ( , , , lit. ''The Dam on the River Amstel'') is the capital and most populous city of the Netherlands, with The Hague being the seat of government. It has a population of 907,976 within the city proper, 1,558,755 in the urban are ...

; and also uses Amazon Web Services for its primary computing infrastructure platforms in order to accelerate its worldwide expansion. In February 2014, Workday acquired the startup Identified and its artificial intelligence Syman to create its Insight Apps line of products. The first products running SYMAN were announced at Workday Rising 2014. In July 2017, Workday CEO Aneel Bhusri announced that the company had decided to open up its platform to developers, partners and third-party software. As a result, Workday will enter the

Platform as a Service Platform as a service (PaaS) or application platform as a service (aPaaS) or platform-based service is a category of cloud computing services that allows customers to provision, instantiate, run, and manage a modular bundle comprising a computing ...

(PaaS) market. Bhusri said the move will allow customers to build custom extensions and applications to work with Workday. In January 2018, Workday announced that it acquired SkipFlag, makers of an AI knowledge base that builds itself from a company's internal communications.

Acquisitions

References

External links

* {{NASDAQ-100 Software companies established in 2005 American companies established in 2005 2012 initial public offerings Software companies based in the San Francisco Bay Area Companies based in Pleasanton, California Cloud computing providers Companies listed on the Nasdaq Companies in the Nasdaq-100 Human resource management software ERP software companies 2005 establishments in California Software companies of the United States