Workday, Inc. is an onâ€'demand (cloud-based) financial management and human capital management software vendor. It 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. It targets the customers of rivals Oracle or SAP. In October 2012, it launched a successful initial public offering that valued the company at $9.5 billion.
Early history
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 sells software and services using the SaaS model.
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 to provide human capital management software services. Other large, multinational companies that have publicly disclosed contracts or deployments of Workday include Aviva, Chiquita Brands, CAEÂ Inc., Fairchild Semiconductor, Rentokil Initial, Thomson Reuters, and Time Warner.
On April 29, 2009, Workday announced that it secured $75 million in funding led by New Enterprise Associates. Existing investors Greylock Partners and Workday CEO and coâ€'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 Investment Management, Janus, and Bezos Expeditions, the personal investment entity of Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos.
The current CEO and Chairman of Workday is Aneel Bhusri, who is a partner with Greylock Partners and handled senior leadership positions earlier in his career at PeopleSoft.
Initial public offering
As of spring 2012, Workday had 310 customers, ranging from mid-sized businesses to Fortune 500 companies. In October 2012, Workday launched its initial public offering (IPO) on the New York Stock Exchange with ticker symbol 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's $16 billion IPO in May 2012. Its shares surged 74% in their IPO, underscoring investor interest in cloud computing.
Business model
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.
Corporate governance
Duffield holds voting rights to Workday shares that were worth $3.4Â billion and Bhusri held rights to shares valued at $1.3Â billion. Collectively, they hold 67% of the company's voting shares. This voting structure makes the event of a hostile takeover much more unlikely.
Product
Workday has released 29 updates to its product line as of September 2017. It releases a major update every 6 months.
Workday adopted the IBM Cloud as its primary development and testing platform in order to accelerate its worldwide expansion.
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 (PaaS) market. Bhusri said the move will allow customers to build custom extensions and applications to work with Workday.
Acquisitions
Investments
In 2013, Workday participated in round D funding of its Big Data Analytics Platform, Datameer.
In 2014, Workday also participated in Anaplan's $100M funding.
References
External links
- Official website
