As Workday looks to double in size to $15 billion over the next several years, chairman Aneel Bhusri used his final appearance on Workday’s quarterly earnings calls to outline six strategic tech-investment categories for the next 18 months.
Bhusri, who cofounded Workday 19 years ago and has served as CEO for more than the past decade, will be pushing those initiatives from a high level in his new non-CEO role, a position he has willfully pursued so that he can focus on strategic innovation while CEO Carl Eschenbach drives revenue growth and go-to-market enhancements.
I’ll get to those six innovations in a moment but first want to recognize the significance of the leadership changes at the top of Workday. Bhusri is universally admired and respected by customers, partners, and many competitors, and reaffirmed his commitment to remain tightly focused on driving new levels of innovation across Workday even as he takes on a less-visible role.
“As executive chair, I’ll remain actively involved but with an emphasis on my true passion as a technologist,” he said on Workday’s fiscal-Q4 earnings call earlier this week.
“Together with our co-president, Sayan Chakraborty, and the rest of our amazing product and technology organization, I will focus on guiding the future direction of Workday’s applications and technology platform while staying close to our Workmates and our customers. How we evolve and expand the Workday platform in the coming years will be critical to our continued growth and scale.”
But Bhusri’s pledge to “remain actively involved” will no longer include participating in quarterly earnings calls. “In my new role, this will be my last regularly scheduled earnings call as I fully hand over the reins to the great Carl and Zane [CEO Carl Eschenbach and CFO Zane Rowe].”
Ask Cloud Wars AI Agent about this analysis
So at this momentous time for Workday, here are the six areas of innovation that Bhusri said will grab the lion’s share of Workday’s research and development (R&D) investments over the next several quarters. And I thought it was very interesting — and certainly wise — that the very first tech-investment priority cited by Bhusri was not AI (that’s the second one) but rather the continued enhancement of Workday’s HCM and Financials applications, which are truly the past as well as future heart and soul of the company.
- 1. Enhance and improve the core. “The first is a continued focus on evolving our financial management and HCM applications so that we can further empower the offices of Finance and HR to optimize their two most important assets: their people and their money,” Bhusri said.
- 2. AI everywhere. “Next is AI. Fueled by our 10-year head start and unique approach to building AI directly into the core, we will continue to responsibly deliver new ML models that solve real business problems for our customers and enable their employees,” Bhusri said. “We’ll also incorporate high-value generative AI capabilities to enhance search, understand historical context, make recommendations, and create content.”
- 3. Industry-specific offerings. The third targeted category cited by Bhusri is industry, with “an emphasis on deepening our offerings in retail and hospitality, education and government, along with financial services, healthcare, professional services, and tech and media,” Bhusri said.
- 4. Expanding the Extend Platform. “Extensibility is another important focus area so that we can enable IT teams to build and maintain integrations between Workday and third-party systems, ultimately extending the value of our platform,” Bhusri said. “Our new Extend API gateway, which we announced at Rising last year, is a perfect example of the type of work we are focused on here.”
- 5. Delivering tailored experiences. “Delivering persona-tailored experiences empowers high-performing employees and teams for maximum productivity,” Bhusri said. “Manager Insights Hub and Flex Teams, which we also unveiled at Rising, are just a few of the ways we’ve already been delivering enhanced experiences for managers.”
- 6. Continuing to champion cybersecurity. “The final area of investment is security and resiliency, which is foundational to everything we do,” Bhusri said. “With more than 10,000 organizations depending on Workday to help run their business, it’s essential that we design to protect the resilience and performance of critical processes, safeguard against the growing number of global cybersecurity threats, and increase our investment in public-cloud offerings to drive greater performance, scalability, and security for our customers.”
Final Thought
I’ve had the privilege to know Aneel Bhusri for most of the 19 years that Workday’s been around, and his careful but firm orchestration of this top-level management change is another example of why he is so respected and admired across the business world. As Eschenbach infuses the sales and go-to-market organizations with a renewed vitality and strategic intent, and as Bhusri is able to channel the vast majority of his brainpower and passion into technology innovation, Workday’s customers, employees, and partners should all feel fully comfortable that the company remains in very good hands for many years to come.
As Bhusri has said on more than one occasion since the hiring of Eschenbach was announced in late 2022, “My title might be changing, but I’m not going anywhere.”
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.
