Welcome to the Cloud Wars Minute — your daily cloud news and commentary show. Each episode provides insights and perspectives around the “reimagination machine” that is the cloud.
Register for Acceleration Economy’s Cloud Wars CEO Outlook 2024 Course, now available. Featuring exclusive interviews on strategy, AI, and customers with the CEOs of Cloud Wars Top 10 companies.
In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I analyze Workday’s robust fiscal results, which showcase the company’s strategic prowess in the competitive cloud landscape.
Highlights
00:25 — Workday, number seven on the Cloud Wars Top 10, has completed its fiscal 2024 on January 31 and just released its numbers. It showed very strong growth in Q4, which I’ll get to in a minute, but I think a big number is its total backlog, which rose for the year 27% to $20.9 billion.
01:00 — In Q4, ended January 31, its subscription revenue was up 18% to $1.8 billion. For the full year, subscription revenue was up 19% to $6.6 billion. I had predicted that Workday was going to come in for Q4 at 19%. I think 18% is very good. It’s consistent with where it’s been the last couple of quarters.
02:08 — I think it really plays into some of the key points that CEO Carl Eschenbach described in the press release beforehand. First, we see more and more customers buying what they call full platform, both HCM and Financials, to have that data together in that single data model. It sees its ecosystem growing, which has been a big priority for Eschenbach, and also, international growth, a top priority.
Ask Cloud Wars AI Agent about this analysis
03:34 — So, we see in this latest report the evidence of a big management shift that co-founder and current executive chairman Aneel Bhusri undertook about a year ago when he brought in Eschenbach to be co-CEO for calendar 2023.
04:21 — You’ve got now more energy that Eschenbach can put into go-to-market and customers and growth, and you’ve got Bhusri now able to be more fully committed to products and innovation. So, things looking good here for Workday. And later this week, we will see the results from both Snowflake and Salesforce.
