In this vendor ranking segment from the Acceleration Economy course The Cloud Wars Top 10: How It Works, Why It Has Shifted, & How CXOs Use It, I share what differentiates Workday, which has recently moved up to #7 in the Cloud Wars Top 10 ranking.
This episode is sponsored by Acceleration Economy’s “Cloud Wars Top 10 Course,” which explains how Bob Evans builds and updates the Cloud Wars Top 10 ranking, as well as how C-suite executives use the list to inform strategic cloud purchase decisions. The course is available today.
Highlights
Workday has long been respected as a powerhouse in human capital management (HCM) and financials while the company has resisted being lumped into the enterprise resource planning (ERP) category. That may be because ERP implementations tend to be viewed as painful, expensive, and complex. Some key observations about Workday and its current direction:
- Customer use cases show when you get HCM together with financials in a single data model, along with industry expertise, that can be a winning combination for customers, especially when ERP complexity is managed.
- The company isn’t a newcomer to artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning (ML): Co-CEO Aneel Bhusri was talking about AI and ML embedded in the company’s software 10 years ago.
- Bhusri has also brought in Carl Eschenbach who will become sole CEO. Eschenbach has noted the importance of bringing in more revenue from outside the U.S.; today non-U.S. customers represent only 25% of its revenue.
- Eschenbach said at an investors conference that the company’s revenue goal should be $20 billion, not $10 billion. The company will need to answer the question of how this growth plan will benefit customers in terms of innovation.
- Customers including VCU Health have explained how Workday was able to help them drive results in their business, and those types of outcomes were a factor in Workday moving up in the rankings.
- Eschenbach is bringing in new leaders to the company; he’s making changes to give the company more “oomph” in the market.
