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Workday Gaining in Field of SaaS Giants

Workday is the second largest publicly traded SaaS company with a market capitalization if $25 billion. It is focused primarily on financial and human capital management and as of January 2018 generated over $2 billion in annual revenues in tandem with a loss of over $300 million. Despite its continued cash burn, analyst view the company favorably anticipating revenue growth to $5 to $6 billion in five years. Over a ten year horizon, revenue could grow towards $10 billion. There’s no sign of slowing down for Workday.

At the company’s helm is Aneel Bhusri, a 52 year old who began his tech career as the director of planning at PeopleSoft in 1993 and later rose to Vice Chairman until the company’s takeover by Oracle in 2004. Aneel is also on the board of directors of Intel and is a partner at Greylock Partners, a venture capital firm. Estimated to be worth approximately $1.5 billion, recently he and his wife, Allison, signed Buffet’s giving pledge.

Workday has ~2,200 customers and purports to be in the early stages of its expansion. Globally, the company targets 25,000 potential customers with over 1,000 employees. Both the company and its observers are bullish on international expansion particularly with Chano Fernandez, Worday’s co-president for global field operations, leading the charge. Broader adoption is being seen in Japan, UK, Germany, France, India and China.

Most recently on June 11, 2018 Workday announced it entered into an agreement to buy Adaptive Insights for ~$1.6 billion in order to further bolster its product portfolio. Adaptive Insights, formerly known as Adaptive Planning, is a SaaS company founded in 2003 focused on business planning – more specifically, market enterprise budgeting, forecasting and reporting. Interestingly, Salesforce.com was one of the company’s early backers. In December, 2017, Adaptive surpassed $100 million in annualized revenue.

Through both domestic and international expansion and its aggressive acquisition strategy, Workday is further solidifying its place among today’s SaaS giants.