Workday’s Dazzling Q3: Goes Live with 2.9 Million Users at Walmart, Accenture, UPS, GE

Workday’s strong fiscal-Q3 results overshadowed an extraordinary achievement: global icons Walmart, Accenture, UPS and GE all went live on Workday HCM in Q3 with those 4 companies representing almost 3 million new users.

(On my weekly Cloud Wars Top 10 rankings, Workday is #8.)

Overall, Workday said it helped a total of 190 customers go live in the 3 months ended Oct. 31, with every one of those managed remotely due to the pandemic. 

New World of Remote Deployment

The simultaneous turn-on of those four enormous organizations shows just how pervasive the enterprise cloud has become, and how rapidly the major cloud vendors have adapted to the new world of remote deployment.

In describing that enormous achievement on Workday’s Nov. 19 fiscal-Q3 earnings call, co-CEO Aneel Bhusri said, “I’m very appreciative and proud of Emily [chief customer officer Emily McEvilly] and our team and our business partners as well who figured out how to get these large customers live during this pandemic. 

“Any one of those going live in the quarter would be terrific, let alone having all four of them go live in the same time-frame. That’s really remarkable from a services perspective.”

Chano Fernandez, who was recently promoted to co-CEO and oversees all field operations, also called out that high-scale achievement. 

Huge Accomplishment in 3-Month Period

“When you think of Walmart with 1.7 million employees going live during this period, or Accenture with over 500,000 employees, or think of UPS or GE, or you think of Progressive Insurance for Financials—and they are all going live during this period, that is no minor accomplishment, right?” Fernandez said.

“Secondly, it’s a testament to our technology and the possibility of being able to do  all of that with a really great performance and scalable technology—that’s a great place to be.”

In addition to the combined 2.2 million employees cited by Workday at Walmart (1.7 million) and Accenture, the UPS website says it has 528,000 employees, and GE was estimated to have 205,000 employees. 

Key Differentiator for Workday

Workday has expended considerable effort to showcase its ability to move customers from purchase to production successfully and productively, and its ability to flip the “On” switch for not just those four huge customers but also 186 others in the 3- month period is impressive.

For its fiscal Q3, Workday reported subscription revenue was up 21% to $969 million, with total revenue reaching $1.1 billion.

Disclosure: at the time of this writing, Workday was among the many clients of Cloud Wars Media LLC and/or Evans Strategic Communications LLC.

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