About Workday

Workday, Inc. (Workday) is a leading provider of enterprise cloud applications for finance and human resources, helping customers adapt and thrive in a changing world. Workday provides more than 10,000 organizations with software-as-a-service solutions to help solve some of today’s most complex business challenges, including supporting and empowering their workforce, managing their finances and spend in an ever-changing environment, and planning for the unexpected. Workday provides organizations with a unified system that can help them plan, execute, analyze, and extend to other applications and environments, thereby helping them continuously adapt how they manage their business and operations. Workday embeds artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) into the very core of iplatform, enabling our applications to natively leverage AI and ML as part of the workflow. As a result, the company’s AI and ML technology helps deliver better employee experiences, improve operational efficiencies, and provides insights for faster, data-driven decision-making. To support this, Workday delivers weekly product updates in addition to major feature releases twice a year. Through this model, Workday customers are able to stay current as one Workday community all on the same version of software that features a unified data and security model and rich user experience. The company sells its solutions worldwide primarily through direct sales. The company also offers professional services, as do its Workday Services Partners, to help customers deploy its solutions and continually adopt new capabilities. In fiscal 2023 (year ended January 31, 2023), the company announced a new Industry Accelerator program that combines Workday partners, solutions, and services to help speed cloud transformation efforts initially targeted at banking, healthcare, insurance, and technology companies. To grow its unified suite of Workday applications, the company primarily invests in research and development, but it also selectively acquires companies that are consistent with its design principles, existing product set, corporate strategy, and company culture. The company engages in acquisitions to augment its suite of applications, such as Peakon ApS (Peakon), a continuous listening platform that captures real-time employee sentiment; Zimit, a configure, price, quote (CPQ) solution built for services industries; and VNDLY, a cloud-based external workforce and vendor management technology. Capabilities Workday’s suite of enterprise cloud applications addresses the evolving needs of the chief financial officer (CFO), chief human resources officer (CHRO), and chief information officer (CIO) across various industries. Workday applications for Financial Management, Spend Management, Human Capital Management (HCM), Planning, and Analytics and Benchmarking can also be extended to other applications and environments through the Workday Cloud Platform. Financial Management: Solutions for the Office of the CFO In the changing world of finance, Workday helps finance leaders accelerate their journeys towards becoming a truly digital finance operation by giving them the tools they need to manage the strategic direction of their organizations while also supporting growth, profitability, and compliance and regulatory requirements. Workday’s suite of financial management applications, built on a foundation with AI and ML at the core, helps enable CFOs to maintain accounting information in the general ledger; manage core financial processes, such as payables and receivables; identify real-time financial, operational, and management insights; improve financial consolidation; reduce time-to-close; promote internal control and auditability; and achieve consistency across global finance operations. Spend Management: Solutions for the Office of the CFO As businesses adapt to changing conditions, Workday provides procurement professionals with tools to support them through the source-to-contract process, such as a user experience designed for ease and collaboration. Workday offers a set of cloud spend management solutions that help organizations streamline supplier selection and contracts, manage indirect spend, and build and execute sourcing events, such as requests for proposals. Human Capital Management: Solutions for the Office of the CHRO In the changing world of human resources (HR), Workday helps organizations identify and respond to rapidly changing conditions, whether they stem from shifting talent needs or a renewed focus on belonging and diversity. Workday’s suite of HCM applications allows organizations to manage the entire employee lifecycle – from recruitment to retirement – enabling HR teams to hire, onboard, pay, develop and reskill, and provide meaningful employee experiences that are personalized and helpful, based on listening to the diverse needs of today’s workforce. For example, the company’s skills technology, built on an AI and ML foundation, helps organizations make the important shift to a skills-first approach, helping them prepare today for the jobs of tomorrow. Planning: Solutions for the Offices of the CFO and CHRO In today’s dynamic business environment, businesses are continuously planning to model various scenarios and preparing to quickly respond to change. Workday provides an active planning process that can model across finance, workforce, sales, and operational data, helping organizations make more informed decisions and respond quickly to changing situations. Workday leverages AI and ML to assist in creating forecasts that incorporate historical and third-party data, like economic data and labor statistics. When combined with Workday’s financial management and HCM solutions, organizations are able to leverage real-time transactional data to dynamically adjust and recalibrate their plans. Analytics and Benchmarking and Workday Cloud Platform: Solutions for the Offices of the CIO, CFO, and CHRO In the changing world of work, Workday helps leaders make sense of the vast amount of data they collect enterprise-wide. For example, information technology (IT) leaders are navigating the complexities of supporting employees in new environments, which requires them to deploy an adaptable, secure architecture to help ensure global continuity and productivity while remaining agile. Workday provides applications for analytics and reporting, including augmented analytics to surface insights to the line of business in simple-to-understand stories, machine learning to drive efficiency and automation, and benchmarks to compare performance against other organizations. In addition, Workday enables the development of extension applications and integration tooling that can accommodate the company’s customers’ unique ways of doing business. Industries: Solutions for the Offices of the CIO, CFO, and CHRO Workday offers businesses flexible solutions to help them adapt to their industry-specific needs and respond to change. Workday’s applications serve industries, such as healthcare, higher education, and professional services. For example, Workday provides supply chain and inventory solutions to healthcare organizations, allowing them to purchase, stock, track, and replenish their inventory to help support patient care. In addition, higher education institutions can deploy Workday’s solutions to manage the end-to-end student and faculty lifecycle. Moreover, with Workday’s solutions, professional services organizations can optimize and manage their client-facing projects. Customers The company primarily sells to medium-sized and large, global organizations that span numerous industry categories, including professional and business services, financial services, healthcare, education, government, technology, media, retail, and hospitality. The company has built a company culture centered around customer success and satisfaction. As part of their subscription, customers are provided support services and tools to enhance their experience with Workday applications. This includes 24/7 support; training; a Customer Success Management group to assist customers in production; and Workday Community, an online portal where customers can collaborate and share knowledge and best practices. Additionally, the company offers extensive customer training opportunities and a professional services ecosystem of experienced Workday consultants and system integrators to help customers not only achieve a timely adoption of Workday but continue to get value out of its applications over the life of their subscription. Sales and Marketing The company sells its subscription contracts and related services globally, primarily through its direct sales organization, which consists of field sales and field sales support personnel. The Workday Field Sales team is aligned by geography, industry, and/or prospect size. The company generates customer leads, accelerate sales opportunities, and builds brand awareness through its marketing programs and strategic relationships. The company’s marketing programs largely target senior business leaders, including CFOs, CHROs, and CIOs. The company’s sales strategy also focuses on growing its relationships with its existing customers to expand the adoption of its suite of solutions over time. As a core part of its sales and marketing strategy, the company has developed a global ecosystem of partners to both broaden and complement its application offerings and to provide services that are outside of its area of focus. These relationships include software and technology partners, consulting and deployment service providers, business process outsourcing partners, and software partners of Workday Ventures, its strategic investment arm, who all help enable Workday to address the challenges its customers face while focusing on executing against its strategy. Seasonality The company has experienced seasonality in terms of when it enters into customer agreements for its services. Historically, the company has signed a significantly higher percentage of agreements with new customers, as well as renewal agreements with existing customers, in the fourth quarter of each fiscal year (year ended January 31, 2023) due to large enterprise account buying patterns. Competition The company competes with large, well-established, enterprise application software vendors, such as Oracle Corporation (Oracle) and SAP SE (SAP). The company also faces competition from other enterprise software vendors, from regional competitors that only operate in certain geographic markets, and from vendors of specific applications that address only one or a portion of its applications, some of which offer cloud-based solutions. These vendors include UKG Inc.; Automatic Data Processing, Inc.; Infor, Inc.; Ceridian HCM Holding Inc.; Microsoft Corporation; Anaplan, Inc.; and Coupa Software Inc. History The company was founded in 2005. It was incorporated in Nevada in March 2005 and reincorporated in Delaware in 2012. The company was formerly known as North Tahoe Power Tools, Inc. and changed its name to Workday, Inc. in July 2005.