Workday, Inc. company overview
My main post on Workday’s technology got really long, so I decided to split out a company backgrounder separately. Here goes.
Workday, Inc. was founded by Dave Duffield and Aneel Bhusri, who’d previously worked together at PeopleSoft. It is generally the case that the companies Dave starts:
- Develop application software for large or fairly large enterprise customers.
- Build those applications in/on their own platform technology, which is meant to be cutting-edge in its day. (For example, PeopleSoft was early in building an RDBMS-based client/server application suite, and did so with the help of a clever technology called PeopleTools I nonetheless helped talk PeopleSoft out of further commercializing.)
- Focus first on human resources software (Dave had another HR company before PeopleSoft).
- Move fairly early into non-profit/higher-education accounting (Dave had a company in that area before PeopleSoft, and PeopleSoft was fairly active in the area too).
- Emphasize a pleasant corporate culture.
All these things seem true of Workday Inc., although the non-profit/higher-ed move is just underway now. Specifically:
- Workday was founded in 2005, starting with an asset buy of some platform software a key PeopleTools developer had been working on for years.
- Workday has had multitenant SaaS offerings from the getgo. (And that’s all Workday does.)
- Workday has around 150 customers.
- Workday sells mainly to multinational corporations, generally based in North America. Efforts in the UK are beginning to ramp up.
- Workday has six core application modules, among which are:
- Workday Human Capital Management (almost all the customers).
- Workday Payroll (a little under 50 customers). Workday is partnered with local providers for payroll in 20 countries, and is building its second inhouse version (Canadian) now.
- Workday Financial Management (a little under 20 customers, for what is far from a complete system).
- Workday Benefits Network, providing connectivity to benefits providers (that’s the only Workday module that isn’t straight software).
- Workday, Inc. has around 500 employees, mainly in Pleasanton, CA. About 20 are in Dublin, Ireland, courtesy of the acquisition of CapeClear. About 1/3 are in development.
Workday prices its services based on metrics for the overall client business, not per-Workday-user. (Actually, the metric is basically headcount, which makes sense given Workday’s application focus.)
Some of these points are covered in more detail in a Workday Inc. slide deck.
This post is part of a three-post series
- Workday Inc. company overview (brief)
- Workday Inc. technology overview (detailed)
- Workday Inc. CTO Stan Swete’s comments on database strategy
Edit: Also, there’s a Workday blog with only a few posts, which nonetheless seems to flesh out a few of the ideas in this post series.
Comments
4 Responses to “Workday, Inc. company overview”
Leave a Reply
[…] kindly allowed me to post this Workday slide deck. Otherwise, I’ve split out a quick Workday, Inc. company overview into a separate […]
[…] Workday Inc. company overview (brief) […]
Interesting article, many thanks.
You said: –
Workday Benefits Network, providing connectivity to benefits providers (that’s the only Workday module that isn’t straight software).
Can you please clarify what you meant by this remark?
Thanks,
Jo
Jo,
It’s more like a communication service.