deal architect

Workday Innovation Summit: “Draw a bigger Enterprise Applications circle”

I thought of Bill Joy during last week’s Workday Innovation Summit. Bill was one of the Sun co-founders and overall is a tech savant. I quoted him in one of my books “If you cannot solve a problem, make the problem bigger. If you draw a bigger circle, you start to see several systems you can work on.”

It’s trite to say we are going through a computing revolution. However, for the most part we hear about consumer grade GenAI, ChatGPT and CoPilots. And in the enterprise, plenty about related infrastructure, particularly GPUs and LLMs.

However, as Malcolm Frank writes at TalentGenius “Enterprise agents are now in a full-blown Cambrian explosion; every week, dozens of new agents hit the market—from scrappy Silicon Valley startups, lumbering tech giants, consulting firms, even DIY shops inside Fortune 500s. Picking the right agent? It’s like scouting baseball players before anyone invented sabermetrics.”

This Analyst Summit was the longest and largest one Workday has ever hosted. I posted on LinkedIn “instant analysis” commentary, but here is more from the event. I especially liked the fact that most sessions drew ambitious circles defining enterprise applications to stand out in this fast changing space.

A new world of enterprise AI

It started with co-founder Aneel Bhusri, who has had time to focus more on AI product strategy since Carl Eschenbach took over as CEO a couple of years ago. Aneel is a rare breed with fingerprints on 3 generations of enterprise applications – client/server (PeopleSoft), cloud and now AI agents. He talked about Workday’s role-based agents which keep expanding in coverage. He also talked about the big differences from GenAI

“The underlying model for business process applications is deterministic. You know what is going to start and end a process. You start a hiring process; you end the hiring process. AI is very different. It's probabilistic. It's about reasoning. It's giving you the highest level of confidence as to whether your solution is right. So fundamentally, it is a very different way of organizing applications and the underlying model.

We set up a dedicated AI team's been running for a while, but now we have a dedicated AI Apps team as well, which we call the agent factory that will build these agents, because it's not like an extension of the cloud, it's something brand new.

We have probably the single biggest HR data set in the world. It's unified as one model. All the customers are running exactly the same version, so completely normalized, very different than our competitors.

The agent system of record that we've announced is going to be built just like an HR system.”

Workday knows where agents would fit on the org chart, what skills they have etc. There's no reason that they shouldn't be that third party Agent Manager as well.

Throughout the event we heard of countless titles like “Transfer Credit Agent” and “Contingent Sourcing Agent”. Many were announced under NDA – the monikers will likely undergo a rationalization.

Not just AI – many more transactional apps

The reality is the world continues to rapidly change and over the last couple of decades, cloud enterprise applications have mostly focused on horizontal business process areas across the English speaking world.

In just the last few years thanks to COVID, Ukraine war, digital transformation we have seen countless new apps become viable - telemedicine, retail returns management, digital twins and CPQ for industrials, EV charging management and billing among others.

Like Trump or not, companies are going to need a slew of new country-specific supply chain, eInvoicing, taxes, customs and other apps. Space, government, next gen making, logistics, farming, construction, plenty of new vertical opportunities will open up.

So, it was nice to hear about Workday’s growing global reach, especially with partners about their vertical applications particularly in the service sector. The wider your transaction portfolio, the bigger your domain expertise and unique data sets to train machines.

 
Ambitious Customers and Partners

Dave Somers, who was MC of the event repeatedly mentioned the Power of 3 (Workday, customers, partners). Matt Brandt discussed the expanding marketplace of apps and the explosion in formal partnerships. Jay Wieczorkowski ran a session on the journey of the Workday platform which is allowing for consistency of development across Workday, its partners and customers.

Elias Eldayrie, CIO at University of Florida presented their Workday journey starting 4 years ago and their more recent AI experiences and possibilities with Workday contract intelligence across an annual spend volume of $1 billion, recruiting 15k new employees a year out of 100k applicants and assistance during large audits a large university endures with Federal, State and Research institutions. He also shared UF’s journey as an “AI University” with over 230 AI enabled courses across colleges and curricula. NVIDIA helped them with the HiPerGator, which is the most powerful university-owned and operated supercomputer in the nation.

Magan Zee of the PGA Tour talked about using the Workday Extend platform to build a custom prize app for hundreds of tournaments they host

 Andy Palmer, Director of Technology at AWS provided a quick update on their massive product investments including Bedrock which allows for access to a long list of Foundation Models through a unified API, Nova which bundles Amazon’s own Foundation Models and their AI chips, Trainium, their training chip set, and Inferentia, which is used for inference and others

Aneel, with his Valley VC connections also talked about learning from Dario Amodei, the CEO of Antrophic, the developer of the Claude family of LLMs. Talking of big thinking, Dario has penned an essay titled The Machines of Loving Grace, a mostly optimistic piece about how people are underestimating the upside of AI (while focusing more on its risks) and his view on potential applications in biology, neuroscience and other aspects of society

Expanded leadership team

Carl introduced Rob Enslin as Chief Commercial Officer and Gerrit Kazmaier as President, Product and Technology. They bring significant global field and product expertise to Workday from Google Cloud and SAP. Throughout the event, we had a chance to spend time with new talent like Athena Karp and Jerry Ting who came with the HiredScore and Evisort acquisitions, and others like Shane Luke, Jim Stratton who are driving forward thinking product evolution. More large circles being drawn.

As we did in the 90s when the BOPS application vendors were at the peak of the tech pyramid we are entering a similar evolution. Hyperscalers, database vendors, SIs are all important but the highest business payback value will come from application and agentic vendors like Workday and their ecosystems.

Expect larger circles from all of them.

Analyst Cam: Analyst Cam: Workday - 2025 Release 1

As we have moved to virtual briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short video segments (with permission) as part of my Analyst Cam series.

Rob Zwiebach, VP Product Management at Workday, does a rapid-fire summary of what is included in the 2025 R1 release this spring. While he is personally focused on the office of the CFO. I appreciated him presenting about Workday’s continued investment in “AI and hyper automation” as well as some of their industry capabilities and global expansion and compliance.

Rob discusses Workday’s focus on ecosystems of “role based” agents, developed by them and by partners. They see agents not just doing individual tasks but filling roles and being able to support humans working in similar roles.

He provides an update on how the Contract Intelligence offering has evolved since their Evisort acquisition.

As part of Workday’s global expansion, he presents on localizations for a growing set of countries. It includes a segment on Avalara ELR – e-invoicing and live reporting.

He presents on several vertical features including a CPQ module for professional services.

As he says, it is a “jam packed” release and he does a nice job speeding through in about 20 minutes

 

Analyst Cam: ZohoDay25 - The Back Story

As we have moved to virtual briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short video segments (with permission) as part of my Analyst Cam series.

My favorite vendor event is the Analyst Summit. In our recent fiction mystery, The AI Analyst, a character describes them

“Those (analyst) briefings have become extremely complex. About a decade ago, Workday pioneered an Analyst Day where it encouraged analysts to tweet. It was an electric environment as management took loads of questions and analysts live tweeted the exchanges. Soon after this, many vendors adopted the same approach. An Indian vendor, Zoho, had taken it to a new level as they flew selected analysts for a week-long trip to its HQ and to its CEO’S farm in South India. It was meant to showcase the firm’s culture and how it was a family to its employees and provided for schools, hospitals, and other facilities.”

The book also describes an Analyst Summit at the Inn at Spanish Bay in Northern California.

While I publish my perspective from such events on LI, X, Instagram and my blogs, I like to invite vendors to present on the prep and summary of the sessions and the hospitality. Zoho always takes me up on that opportunity

Mira Natrajan, part of the Corporate Communications team presents below on ZohoDay25 held recently at the Horseshoe Bay Resort in Texas Hill Country. It fits in with Zoho's corporate preference for secondary and tertiary towns and focus on rural revival.

She covers the unique branding Zoho’s amazing creative team conjures for each event (see more about the creative team here), details of the history and campus of the facility, the sessions and social agenda, the demographics of the audience, summary of some of the key sessions and contrasts this event to those in previous years.

Very nicely done in about 35 minutes.

The Mother of all Disruptions

Two Wednesdays ago, I was getting some of my daily steps on the 14th deck of the Celebrity Ascent which had sailed from Barcelona. I greeted “good morning” to a gentleman passing me. He stopped and said “Not a good, but a great, morning”. I presumed he was a fellow Floridian as we were headed to Ft. Lauderdale and we started a quick conversation. He was actually from California and he poured out what exactly he thought about his Governor and his state. Over the next couple of days, I had many similar conversations with others we had met on the ship about the US elections. I would preface the conversations with a simple question "Are you glad or sad?" Most said glad about the election results, sad about the cruise ending.

I am a registered Independent and tend to have low expectations of politicians in Washington, DC. I had written this blog post My 10 asks of the next POTUS in early August and had been disappointed that neither candidate had focused much on policy matters. As it is now becoming clear, Kamala spent too much on celebrities and campaign cosmetics and Trump on rah rah rallies. Entertaining but content-light.

My 10 points had called for

• Reduce our National Debt which has spiraled in the last decade
• Deliver trade surpluses after decades of deficits
• Make us an energy innovator with next-gen nuclear, carbon capture etc
• Get serious about “affordable” healthcare and delver much better outcomes
• Tie immigration to our talent needs – we have a process which works but that we have ignored
• Take care of our aging baby boomers
• Quit spilling our young blood in faraway places
• Be fluent in STEM – our leaders need to celebrate and highlight the wide US STEM leadership
• Celebrate the nuclear family – I have a nuanced point of view on why we have created our distorted population pyramid
• Re-prioritize common sense – we have paid too much attention to activists and ideologues

Clearly, I have tall expectations which call for disruptors to divert the trajectory in each area. However, I figured I would mostly hear celebratory talk from Trump till he took office in late January.

So, I have been blown away by how quickly he is assembling his core team . I like many of them – Elon, Vance, Vivek, Burgum, Tulsi, RFK Jr, Rubio, Lutnick, Kristii, Hegseth,Wright. Many are youngish, entrepreneurial and importantly they are STEM savvy. They can clearly be disruptors. Match them to my 10 “asks”.

In response, I have also heard an equal and opposite reaction to them from many defending the status quo.

My career has thrived on disruption in the tech sector. I helped clients replace mainframe applications with client server flavors at PwC and Gartner. At Deal Architect I helped a number of clients with due diligence around offshore development in emerging economies around the world. I have helped clients move to cloud applications, evaluate hyperscalers replacing propriety data centers and outsourcers, evaluate benefits of automation from robotics to now Gen AI. I have seen global economies ebb and flow in my travels across 75 countries. I have seen verticals dramatically transform over the last few years, many with brand new competitors. It shows in the massive changes in vendor portfolio over the last two decades of Deal Architect and in our family budget – especially in telecoms, financial services, travel and retail.

Disruptors are by definition bulls in a china shop. They leave behind winners and losers. They inevitably face resistance to change. But life and business goes on, and usually gets better.

I have learned to present pros and cons, logically not ideologically, when I invited to. It definitely helps that I have spent time with countless execs for books like “Business as Unusual”. I have learned from others talk about a ‘Fail Faster” culture. A CEO once told me “Never offer a Plan B. Burn the boats behind you.”

We are entering a phase of great disruption. Like most, I am anxious. But I am also excited.

loanDepot – Conversation with a “dream” Workday customer

In the technology world, we often narrowly define customer experience or CX as our reaction to software user experience or UX – how pretty, how intuitive etc. To me CX is much broader – how successful was the implementation, what does the customer tell peers when they are doing reference calls, how do they advise customers from other industries and countries, what enhancements do they prioritize from the vendor etc. I have written about many customers in over 200 case studies in our long-format content – especially our innovation focused books. Those take several conversations. It is rare after just one session that I tell an executive they are a “dream customer.”

I recently had a chance to spend about an hour at Workday Rising with Jennifer Edwards, SVP, Accounting Systems at loanDepot, based in Irvine, CA.  Rather than just a narrow view of their Workday project, Jennifer shared valuable insights into the mortgage financing sector. We discussed Workday’s Accounting Center, Prism Analytics, and the innovative Illuminate AI agents, as well as her interactions within the Workday community. I couldn't help but express, on two occasions, that she exemplified what it means to be a “dream customer” for Workday.

Here are some excerpts from our conversation

About loanDepot

loanDepot was founded in 2010, right after the subprime mortgage crisis. The founder, Anthony Hsieh saw an opportunity to start a new, digital mortgage lending experience to make the home buying and financing process more efficient and transparent with modern technologies. They built third-party integrations directly into the originations process to collect a borrower’s income, employment, and asset information to deliver a fast and hassle-free transaction experience.  That was revolutionary in a sector which used to be paper intensive. Since inception, they have funded more than $498 billion. Today, their nationwide team of 4,000 plus members assists more than 6,800 customers with mortgage originations transactions each month.

Her career in financial services, accounting and related systems

Jen started her career in auditing at KPMG, in the financial services sector in the Southern California area just before the 2008 crash. She got to see many troubled banks. She left KPMG after 7 years to join a regional bank as the head of their internal audit. That role expanded her exposure to systems, again on a timely basis, as companies were focusing on process automations, digital transformations, adopting cloud computing, etc. In her role, she reviewed process and controls around several new systems implementations. And loved the experience around the systems side of accounting. Since 2020, she has been involved in Workday (financials related) projects at loanDepot. She enjoys the financial services sector because of the macroeconomic lens it brings, and how it's so important for the health of the US economy.

The Workday product differentiation in their sector

in 2020, loanDepot decided to digitally transform their office of the CFO. They already had implemented Workday HCM and payroll. So Workday Financials, Accounting Center and Prism Analytics was the most logical, best-fitting solution as they facilitated the precision of the loan-level accounting at a low level of granularity and, importantly, did so at their large scale of volumes. They previously used an industry specific product but realized it could not easily scale to their exploding volumes.  Jen had joined loanDepot to help with the Workday Financials implementation and then stayed to run that team post-go-live in a new organizational format.

The Workday decision was made easier because Fannie Mae, who they sell a large volume of loans to, had been an early adopter of Workday’s Accounting Center and Prism (along with the financial modules). Accounting Center is designed for the systems accountant, a functional knowledge owner, to automate the rules that summarize operational data into resulting summarized journal entries. They use Prism for its attribute-rich reporting dimensionality from the resulting data sets and ingested complimentary operational data sets. Accounting Center is also helping them automate their fair value process and month-end gains and losses, as they ingest loans held for sale, and interest rate lock commitments.

Most ERP systems don’t make it easy to store attributes like associated loan officer, loan purpose or product, or property state. With Workday, they are ingesting more related operational data fields for a single transaction compared to what you can normally do in a ledger. The Workday differentiation will increase as they continue making enhancements to analytics and reports by leveraging new features that enable reporting on prism attributes within hierarchical formats.

Her Workday community participation

She is very active in the Workday community and participates in early design and partner groups, testing and giving feedback. She sits on the Financial Services Industry Vertical Customer Council, advocating for a collaborative approach to problem-solving with vendors (and like-minded customers). She conducts reference calls, often fielding inquiries from customers curious about their support models, particularly regarding how financial teams should collaborate with HCM and Payroll departments. Given the sensitive nature of the data involved, this collaboration can present challenges, especially for organizations that do not implement both areas concurrently. Her reference calls and industry presentations are not restricted to peers in her sector. She speaks at Rising and has been part of the Workday – Intelligent Finance Tour – and gets questions from people interested in Accounting Center outside of financial services.

Her relationship with Workday has allowed her to appreciate the company's unique culture, which she feels genuinely values its customers. Jennifer notes, “It’s been a joy to watch what the new CEO Carl Eschenbach has been doing for the company, and the fun that CMO Emma Chalwin is having.”

More Workday innovation

At Rising, Workday revealed several AI agents and the acquisition of Evisort, a contract intelligence tool. She particularly liked the natural language user interface where you can ask the system via your mobile phone to do specific tasks. She is also excited about the various Agents and is excited to see what financial related agents will be “next”. In a document intensive profession (accounting) and environment that is loanDepot, she looks forward to learning about use cases Evisort could offer them particularly around areas like leases, supplier contracts, and supplier invoices. Not so much for loanDepot which is a nationwide nonbank mortgage lender, but for broader banking, she would like to see Workday build out the banking core.  As well as offer, industry specific reporting packaged solutions for regulatory reporting requirements for the industry: for example- call reporting for banks and mortgage bankers financial reporting (MBFRF).

“Fail Faster” culture

Before our meeting, Workday had honored Dave Smoley with a lifetime customer appreciation award for his projects at Flextronics, Astra Zeneca and Apple. I mentioned to her I had written a case study of Flex’s risky decision to implement Workday as a global HCM system when Workday was still a tiny startup. I told her Dave had justified it as doable in Flex’s “fail faster” culture

Jen’s response was “That is a hugely important cultural thing that not all organizations do and I try to; loanDepot’s culture pushes me to lead by being daring in our pursuits and dynamic in our actions.  We use the data we have to make the best decisions we can, but we know we're human. We're not going to get it perfect every time.”

I look forward to conversations with other financial executives as Workday crosses the 2,000 customer mark who use their financial modules. Jen has set a benchmark for them to pack a lot of content into just one session.

Analyst Cam: Zoho’s Enhanced Analytics

As we have moved to virtual briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short video segments (with permission) as part of my Analyst Cam series.

Zoho launched today a new version of Zoho Analytics—Zoho's self-service BI and analytics platform. https://www.zoho.com/analytics/ It packages over 100 enhancements including new AI and ML capabilities, enabling diagnostic insights, predictive analysis, and automated report and dashboard generation.

Zoho Analytics, first launched as Zoho Reports in 2009,  has quietly become a major player in the crowded Business Intelligence market. It is the second most used application in the Zoho One suite (which I have written about often over the last few years). That’s particularly impressive when you consider the suite has over 50 applications.

In addition to 17,000 direct customers of the analytics capabilities, several ISV and SI partners have adapted the analytics engine for their platforms and as a result Zoho can claim 70,000 analytics customers. Importantly, that also translates to a wide breadth and depth of data which Zoho’s over 500 connectors have access to.  That range also positions it well for the growing Generative AI market, especially as customers look for cross-functional and vertical use cases.

As part of the launch, I had a chance to record Sailas Sundaram, Senior Product Manager of the Zoho BI Platform, as he summarizes some of the new capabilities. He does so crisply across these 4 categories.

He goes through a long list of features across the 4 areas including the pipeline builder which enables data engineers to orchestrate and monitor the data flow from source to destination.  He discusses integration with OpenAI, MS Teams and Slack and adding support for more regional languages to Ask Zia, their natural language assistant.

He covers DSML Studio with AutoML, a no-code assistant, to easily build custom ML models. He explains the BI fabric which allows for combing insights from multiple BI platforms, such as Power BI and Tableau, onto one, easily accessible analytics portal.

Lots more in the rapid fire 20 minute video. Very nicely done.

The eye of Hurricane GenAI – the calm surrounded by destruction

Margaret and I drove through Hurricane Debby on Monday because of flight cancellations from Charlotte, and it reminded me of conversations with folks at the National Hurricane Center. While storms are extremely disruptive, the 20-30 mile wide eye of most hurricanes is relatively calm.

It is a good metaphor for what is happening in GenAI markets

Larry Dignan at Constellation analyzes recent earnings calls at Microsoft, Alphabet and others and summarizes what he calls a “halo narrative” around GenAI.

“Enterprise software vendors haven't been thrilled about the narrative that they aren't directly monetizing generative AI so the narrative is subtly being flipped”  and

“GenAI is just software so don't go looking for direct revenue impacts.”

Larry and I had recorded a Burning Platform episode last November which presaged many of the trends which have led to this predicament and you can revisit them here

I would not scoff at any revenues, so don’t want to dismiss the halo effect explanation. However, to me it also highlights a lack of imagination at many vendors and the lack of appropriate data to create compelling GenAI use cases. I find Wall Street tends to often be myopic about CapEx spend at software and services firms, but in this case, we are throwing massive GPU and LLM resources at the problem, and it is not unreasonable to ask “where’s the beef?”   

Developer productivity is showing up as a compelling GenAI use case for many vendors. They have plenty of previous written code in their own software, at their customers and at their partners to train their machines and at least generate a first draft of new code. SIs and outsourcers have plenty of data in 000s of proposals, custom code, test routines, data conversion, training modules and other assets and if they could get over their labor intensive mind set they could also deliver significant productivity with GenAI.

Vendors also have plenty of what Malcolm Frank calls SGA (sales, general and administrative) data to generate attractive (but not necessarily premium priced) GenAI use cases - watch this Burning Platform episode where we talked about raising the bar for AI. However, most vendors don’t have much COGS (Cost of Goods Sold) or Revenue or Balance Sheet data. They also don’t have many practitioners with depth in those areas. Operations and business models tend to be very different by industry and country and without that data and talent you cannot imagine or offer compelling AI use cases.

The chickens have finally come home to roost. I have said often that even after 25 years of SaaS applications, 75% of business processes across countries and industries do not have much vendor application choice. Vendors were content to keep selling basic ERP and CRM functionality, and there mostly for English speaking countries. If anything, the hype from GenAI caused a pause in expanding their transactional functionality.

Even SAP which has the broadest reach of customers, functionality and talent across industries and countries has been cautious in the reach of its GenAI offerings

The good news is the market is wide open for incumbent vendors and new entrants to build transactional functionality for so many unexplored markets. They can build their talent and data, and GenAI use cases for several niches. Many of these markets should be highly differentiated and command premiums which Wall Street expects to pay for NVIDIA GPUs and hyperscaler pricing.

There is one big caveat to all this. With the excitement around GenAI over the last couple of years, I have seen customers wake up to the realization that they themselves have the relevant practitioners and they also have the operational and revenue data. Why should they share that intellectual property with vendors and additionally need to pay for the privilege? Many customers are learning how to monetize that data. They will share such IP at very different price points. 

The tech customers of yesterday could become tech vendors of tomorrow. Indeed that is a sub plot in my upcoming fiction thriller titled the ’The AI Analyst’ which is expected to be released by Thanksgiving.

Now that is fiction,  but even in real life, data is the new oil and battles are already being fought where data is being stolen and traded 

Gen AI is real. Finding use cases that justify the computing cost and talent are still elusive. It will take a new vendor mindset and business model to get use cases which justify pricing premiums that pay for the AI CapEx and practitioners.  

But you need to get to the calm eye of the GenAI hurricane. The eyewall is way too turbulent. Even better get to terra firma. Driving through the relentless rain from Debby this week, we were glad we weren't flying through it.

Burning Platform: The Workday Extend Platform blossoms

For the 123^rd episode of Burning Platform, we host Jay Wieczorkowski, GM Extend, and discuss many aspects of the Workday platform and the growing ecosystem around it  

The first 25 minutes are a presentation by Jay where he discusses platform features and use cases, the recent hackathon at their DevCon event, the GenAI impact on the platform, the growing user and partner developed applications

We then have a discussion around how Workday is managing the wide spectrum of users of the platform – end user and citizen developers and much more sophisticated partner and IT developers.

We cover the growing partner ecosystem (which Matt Brandt, Senior Vice President, Global Partners had also discussed in this episode) and the fact that developer productivity is shaping up as one of the most promising uses for Gen AI, and how Workday is balancing that with its goals of “responsible AI”.

We discuss the co-opetition with hyperscaler platforms. Jay says it’s “not a zero sum game” and discusses how they are leveraging AWS Textract and Lambda and Google Gemini among other capabilities.

I love his passion when he describes the energy and intensity of the hackathon

“We have 40 judges that go around to each table, and (project teams do) 10 rounds of rapid fire presentations where they have to literally present their project to people 10 times in a row, five minutes each time. The energy in the room between the judges scrambling to go to the next table and then learning about all these projects, and then real time judging on their phone, and then the teams, practicing and rehearsing and honing their presentations. They keep getting better with each round, and we use that process to create our top 10, where they present on stage, and then we choose the final winners. That energy truly encapsulates our community. These are folks that built their career on Workday, folks that we are committed to investing in. These are folks that are often behind the curtains, making change happen, and it's just really exciting to celebrate that and also celebrate that they are learning new technology, exploring and seeing the art of the possible…that brings it all together.”

Very nicely done in under 40 minutes.

Analyst Cam: Workday – Office of the CFO solutions

As we have moved to virtual briefings, I have increasingly been excerpting short video segments (with permission) as part of my Analyst Cam series.

Rob Zwiebach, VP Product Management at Worlday presents a rapid overview of their solutions aimed at the CFO

“We are talking about the overall solutions for the office of the CFO, and it's a very broad set of capabilities - everything that a medium to large organization needs to manage its financials across record to report, procure to pay, quote to cash - really the full set of financial processes.

The solutions harness what he calls “intelligent data core”. “It is a fundamental differentiator for Workday built on a common set of platform capabilities, including common security model, common privacy model and with artificial intelligence built right into the platform."

He spends some time explaining first principles they applied to their product suite at its origin over a decade ago. “We don't have this fixed accounting key where users always have to enter these codes with a certain number of characters. Instead, we just focus on capturing what dimensionality is relevant and contextual based on what the user is doing.”

Rapid fire, he talks about transactional functionality, AI use cases, Prism Analytics, Adaptive Planning, consolidations, country specific localizations and more.

I have invited him back to drill further into some of the areas. For now, enjoy this very crisp overview in 25 minutes.

Workday joins the Fortune 500

Workday entered the prestigious Fortune 500 club this year.

Importantly, 60% of its Fortune 500 peers use its software. It has shown it can scale its HR and Financial applications to support very large payloads.

Impressively, in a world where large companies tend to go with “safe choices”, Workday managed to break through as a startup and in the early days of SaaS. I had the opportunity to profile one of its earliest large customers, Flextronics (which had a run rate of $20 billion back then) in one of my books. My write up profiled the meeting on Saturday, February 23, 2008 between the Workday founders, Dave Duffield and Aneel Bhusri with the CEO and CIO of Flextronics.  

Dave Smoley, then CIO there, had given me some of the backdrop  

“It was the meeting where our IT council gave me the green light to proceed with a major global project to consolidate 80 different HR systems across the world. We had settled on our existing ERP vendor’s software…. I thanked them for approving such a large project and then I surprised them. I told them I may come back to them in the next month with a ‘better, faster, cheaper’ option.”

I remember I blurted out at the audacity “You did what? You turned down an approved budget and stuck your neck out for a global project with an unproven vendor?” and he explained they had a “fail faster culture” and the due diligence they had already conducted on Workday.

Mike McNamara, then CEO, told me it took him 20 minutes to get comfortable with the two founders. “Yes, they did not have the size or scale, but these two had done this before a few times.”

Since then I have had a chance to talk to many customers who have often gone through even more torturous evaluations and decided on Workday.

The next wave of opportunities for Workday will come from global expansion – today only 25% of revenues are outside the US. They will come from increased verticalization in the services sector as their execs in healthcare and professional services have shared in our video series. They will come from AI use cases which new (as in just over a year) CEO Carl Eschenbach explained in a recent Q&A

“With more than 65 million users generating more than 800 billion transactions per year on our platform, the volume of clean, trusted data that Workday and our ecosystem can leverage for AI is truly unmatched. Today we have 50 AI use cases available to customers, and 25 generative AI use cases on the roadmap to help our customers make confident decisions faster, increase efficiency, and drive productivity.” 

So, what could be next goals? Clearly climbing up from rank 490 in the F500. Also, brand new benchmarks are being set by the “Magnificent Seven” stocks – Apple, Microsoft and NVIDIA each have valuations of over $3 trillion. Alphabet and Amazon hover around $2 trillion. The highest Workday has been is around $80 billion. So, literally the sky is the limit.

Much more about their likely trajectory in this blog post I wrote after their recent Innovation Summit – about “unleashing the beast”