Workday CEO Aneel Bhusri believes Oracle has been too slow to move to the cloud with its HCM solutions, and that its tardiness has come at a price.
“As it relates to all of our legacy competitors, they were slow to move to the cloud,” Bhusri said during Workday’s fourth-quarter earnings call. “They might have done a good job on some of the sales opportunities, but the deployment side hasn’t worked out and so those accounts [came] back to market.”
.@Workday's Bhusri says deployment services hammer @Oracle, @SAP. 'How customers measure success of a product.' #HR #HRTech Click To TweetBhusri said a similar dynamic was at play with SAP customers. Against both competitors, he said, Workday can “hang our hat” on its ability to provide better deployment services. “That is how customers measure the success of these projects,” he explained. “It’s not about what they buy. It’s what they get live and what they get value from and that’s going to continue to be the case.”
For the quarter, Workday reported revenue of $976.3 million, an increase of 23.8 percent from the fiscal 2019’s fourth period. Subscription revenues rose about 25 percent to $839.7 million. The company said it has more than 3,200 customers and a 97 percent customer satisfaction rate.
The company’s operating loss was pegged at $146 million, or about negative 15 percent of revenues, compared to a negative 15.3 percent a year ago. Operating income was $116.6 million, or about 11.9 percent of revenue, up from $92.7 million, or $11.8 percent of revenue.
Workday’s Ambitions
Workday HCM turned in a strong performance during the first quarter, Bhusri said. HCM added 11 Fortune 500 customers, giving it a presence within 45 percent of the companies. Among the new customers were Southwest Airlines and Wells Fargo Bank
About a year ago, Bhusri told Workday’s employees of his goal to increase annual sales from $2 billion to $10 billion over six years. In the 12 months since, the company posted revenue of $3.63 billion, an increase of 28.5 percent from fiscal 2019. Subscription revenues rose 29.8 percent to $3.1 billion.
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