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In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I go over Carl Eschenbach’s comments about Workday’s third-quarter earnings.
Highlights
00:41 — Over at Workday, we see a lot of momentum, and I’m calling this the Eschenbach effect. Subscription revenue was up 18%. Total subscription revenue backlog is 31%.
01:49 — So, that 31% is up to $18.45 billion. And I think the 12-month subscription backlog was up 22%; 24-month, up 23%; even farther out into the future, total backlog bumped up to 31%. Powered by this strong Q2 and Q3, Workday’s raising its estimates of what it thinks it’ll do in Q4 and for the year.
02:47 — Eschenbach cited three priorities among customers. The first is the quest for talent, as he said. So, it’s about skills. It’s about upskilling. It’s about talent, it’s about employee experience, all of those things.
03:22 —The second one is that Eschenbach said that a lot of their customers are saying, look, we’ve got all different sorts of applications here. It doesn’t make sense for us. And it’s not practical for us. He said they want to consolidate on a platform.
03:57 — The third one, understandably, some we’re seeing everywhere, is that customers want generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) to turn from a cool thing that has everybody’s attention into a tool that drives great business outcomes.
05:14 — Eschenbach is a powerful figure. After almost a year now, we’re seeing the Eschenbach effect with these strong numbers, great growth opportunities for the future, and big plans for Workday to continue being one of the key participants in this, the greatest growth market the world has ever known.
