Workday, Inc. (‘Workday’), an enterprise platform, provides organizations with solutions for financial management, human capital management (‘HCM’), planning, spend management, and analytics. With Workday, the company’s customers have an artificial intelligence (“AI”)-powered cloud platform that helps them manage their most important assets – their people and money.
Workday provides more than 11,000 organizations with cloud solutions powered by artificial intelligence (‘AI’) to help solve some...
Workday, Inc. (‘Workday’), an enterprise platform, provides organizations with solutions for financial management, human capital management (‘HCM’), planning, spend management, and analytics. With Workday, the company’s customers have an artificial intelligence (“AI”)-powered cloud platform that helps them manage their most important assets – their people and money.
Workday provides more than 11,000 organizations with cloud solutions powered by artificial intelligence (‘AI’) to help solve some of most complex business challenges, including supporting and empowering their workforce, managing their finances and spend in an ever-changing environment, and planning for the unexpected.
The company strives to make the world of work and business better, and hopes to empower customers to do the same through an innovative suite of solutions with more than 70 million users under contract around the world and across industries – from emerging and medium-sized businesses to more than 60% of the Fortune 500.
In the year ended January 31, 2025 (fiscal 2025), the company announced Workday Illuminate, the next generation of Workday AI, designed to help its customers accelerate manual tasks, assist their employees, and transform their business processes. Workday Illuminate is built into its platform, allowing it to rapidly deliver and sustain models that can solve countless business problems. As a result, Workday Illuminate helps deliver better employee experiences, increase productivity, improve operational efficiencies, and provide insights for faster, data-driven decision-making. To support its customers and help them continuously adapt how they manage their business and operations, Workday delivers weekly product updates in addition to major feature releases twice a year. Through this model, Workday customers are able to deliver and adopt innovations quickly and adapt at a time that fits their business needs. The company sells its solutions worldwide primarily through direct sales by its field sales teams. It also offers professional services, as do its Workday Services Partners, to help customers deploy its solutions and continually adopt new capabilities.
In fiscal 2025, the company announced several Workday Illuminate-powered capabilities that are expected to be generally available to customers in fiscal 2026, including a set of new role-based AI agents for recruiting, talent mobility, succession, and optimization, and a new Workday Assistant to help simplify common human resources (‘HR’) and finance processes. Workday Wellness, another new Workday Illuminate-powered solution, will help provide companies with a real-time view into which benefits and wellness offerings their employees want and use, and give AI-driven recommendations on how to improve their benefits programs. In February 2025, the company announced additional role-based AI agents for contracts, payroll, financial auditing, and policy. It also announced the Workday Agent System of Record, which is designed to help its customers embrace agentic AI by providing a centralized system for managing, tracking, integrating, and optimizing AI agents that are built by Workday, the customer, or third parties. The Workday Agent System of Record and new role-based AI agents are in development and are expected to become available later in fiscal 2026.
Capabilities
Workday’s suite of enterprise cloud applications addresses the evolving needs of the C-suite across various industries and is designed to be open, extensible, and configurable, allowing integration with other applications and the ability for users and the company’s partners to build custom applications. Workday offers Financial Management, Spend Management, Human Capital Management (‘HCM’), Planning, and Analytics applications.
Financial Management: Solutions for the Office of the Chief Financial Officer (‘CFO’)
Workday helps organizations accelerate their journeys towards becoming truly digital finance organizations by giving them the tools they need to manage the strategic direction of their organizations while also supporting growth, profitability, and compliance and regulatory requirements. Workday’s suite of financial management applications, built on the Workday platform with Workday Illuminate at the core, helps enable CFOs to maintain accounting information; manage core financial processes, such as payables and receivables; identify real-time financial, operational, and management insights; perform financial consolidation; reduce time-to-close; promote internal control and auditability; and achieve consistency across global finance operations. The company’s AI-powered capabilities for finance are designed to transform certain accounting, finance, and procurement processes by anticipating and streamlining common actions and workflows to help increase productivity.
Spend Management: Solutions for the Office of the CFO
Workday helps enable procurement professionals to support their businesses throughout the source-to-contract process, including a user experience designed for ease of use and collaboration. Workday offers a set of spend management solutions that help organizations streamline supplier selection and contract management, build and execute sourcing events, such as requests for proposals, and manage indirect spend. Additionally, Workday offers an expense management solution that provides users with flexible ways to submit and approve expenses, while providing leaders the ability to set controls and analyze spend.
Human Capital Management: Solutions for the Office of the Chief Human Resources Officer (‘CHRO’)
Workday delivers HR solutions to help organizations build a skilled workforce, drive productivity, and create an engaging workplace. Workday’s suite of HCM applications allows organizations to manage the entire employee lifecycle – from recruitment to retirement – enabling HR teams to hire, onboard, pay, develop and reskill, and provide meaningful employee experiences that are personalized and helpful, based on listening to the diverse needs of today’s workforce. For example, the company is helping organizations manage their total workforce in one seamless experience on Workday through its solutions, including Workday Adaptive Planning, Workday Illuminate-powered recruiting agent, Workday VNDLY, and Workday HCM.
Planning: Solutions for the Offices of the CFO and CHRO
Workday provides an active planning process that can model across finance, workforce, sales, and operational data, helping organizations make more informed decisions and respond quickly to changing situations. Workday Illuminate assists in creating forecasts that incorporate historical and third-party data, such as economic data and labor statistics. When combined with Workday’s Financial Management and HCM solutions, organizations are able to leverage real-time transactional data to dynamically adjust and recalibrate their plans.
Analytics and Reporting and Workday Platform: Solutions for the Offices of the Chief Information Officer (‘CIO’), CFO, and CHRO
Workday helps leaders make sense of the vast amount of data they collect enterprise-wide. For example, information technology (‘IT’) leaders are navigating the complexities of supporting employees in new environments, which requires them to deploy an adaptable, secure architecture to help ensure global continuity and productivity while remaining agile. Workday provides applications for analytics and reporting, including augmented analytics to surface insights to the line of business in simple-to-understand stories. The Workday Platform combines both the innovation built by Workday and on Workday by its customers and partners, providing organizations with the flexibility to integrate third-party applications and services directly into Workday. By managing their people and money together on the Workday platform, its customers can gain new possibilities for increased agility, transformation, and performance.
Industries: Solutions for the Offices of the CIO, CFO, and CHRO
Workday offers businesses flexible solutions to help them adapt to their industry-specific needs and respond to change. Workday’s applications serve industries, such as financial services, healthcare, higher education, state and local government, and professional services. For example, Workday provides supply chain and inventory solutions to healthcare organizations, allowing them to purchase, stock, track, and replenish their inventory to help support patient care. In addition, higher education institutions can deploy Workday’s solution to manage the end-to-end student and faculty lifecycle. Workday also enables its partner ecosystem to build industry-specific solutions. With Workday Extend, customers and their developers can build custom applications that can accommodate their unique industry business needs, complete with the same experience, security model, and reliability of the native applications offered by Workday.
Product Development
The company invests significant resources into product development and are committed to rapidly building and/or acquiring new applications and solutions. The company’s product development organization is responsible for product design, development, testing, and certification. The company focuses its efforts on developing new applications and core technologies, as well as further enhancing the usability, functionality, reliability, security, performance, and flexibility of existing applications. To grow the company’s suite of Workday applications, the company primarily invests in research and development, but the company also selectively acquires companies that are consistent with its design principles, existing product set, corporate strategy, and company culture. For example, in fiscal 2025, the company acquired HiredScore, Inc. (“HiredScore”), a leading provider of AI-powered talent orchestration solutions, and Evisort Inc. (“Evisort”), a provider of an AI-native document intelligence platform. The company also manages a portfolio of strategic investments through Workday Ventures, its strategic investment arm. The company invests primarily in enterprise cloud technology companies that are digitally transforming their industries, developing innovative AI-powered technology, improving customer experiences, helping the company expand its solution ecosystem or supporting other corporate initiatives.
Sales and Marketing
The company sells its subscription contracts and related services globally, primarily through its direct sales organization, which consists of field sales and field sales support personnel. The Workday Field Sales team is aligned by geography, industry, and/or customer size. It also segments its sales teams into two distinct groups: those focused on landing new customer relationships, and those focused on expanding its relationship within its existing customers. The company generates customer leads, accelerates sales opportunities, and builds brand awareness through its marketing programs and strategic relationships. Its marketing programs largely target senior business leaders, including CFOs, CHROs, and CIOs. The company also generates customer leads and transacts through its partner ecosystem, including through resellers.
The company’s sales strategy is focused on both adding new customers and on growing its relationships with its existing customers to expand the adoption of its suite of solutions over time.
Partner Ecosystem
As a core part of the company’s strategy, it has developed and continues to grow a global ecosystem of partners that build and sell new applications on the Workday platform, source new business with Workday, and deliver quality services and customer outcomes with Workday. These relationships include innovation partners, sales partners, and services partners. Together, Workday and the company’s partners help its customers to better manage their people and their money. The Workday Marketplace allows customers to find Built on Workday applications, Industry Accelerators, packaged solutions, and other integrations and solutions that are purpose-built to complement the Workday platform in targeted countries and industries. Strategic partnerships with public cloud providers, including Amazon Web Services, Inc. (‘AWS’) and Google Cloud, allow its customers to reduce their committed spend on cloud. The company’s global partnerships with payroll providers, including Automatic Data Processing, Inc. (‘ADP’) and Strada, enable integrated and streamlined payroll solutions across the world. The company’s Industry Accelerator program, including 12 new Industry Accelerators announced during fiscal 2025, combines Workday partners, solutions, and services to help speed cloud transformation efforts tailored to solve its customers’ industry-specific challenges.
Customers
The company sells to emerging, medium-sized, and large global organizations that span numerous industry categories, including professional and business services, financial services, healthcare, education, government, technology, media, retail, and hospitality.
The company has built a company culture centered around customer success and satisfaction. As part of their subscription, customers are provided support services and tools to enhance their experience with Workday applications. This includes 24/7 support; training; a Customer Success Management group to assist customers in production; and Workday Community, an online portal where customers can collaborate and share knowledge and best practices. In addition, the company offers Workday Success Plans, a comprehensive, add-on subscription service that delivers continuous value for its customers through strategic advice, product expertise, adoption resources, on-demand education, and technical guidance. The company also offers extensive customer training opportunities and a professional services ecosystem of experienced Workday consultants and system integrators to help customers achieve a timely adoption of Workday and enable them to enhance the value of its applications over the life of their subscription.
Seasonality
The company has experienced seasonality in terms of when it enters into customer agreements for its services. Historically, it has signed a significantly higher percentage of agreements with new customers, as well as renewal agreements with existing customers, in the fourth quarter (year ended January 31, 2025) of each fiscal year due to customer buying patterns.
Competition
The company competes with large, well-established, enterprise software vendors, such as Oracle Corporation (‘Oracle’) and SAP SE (‘SAP’). It also faces competition from other enterprise software vendors, from regional competitors that only operate in certain geographic markets, from vendors of specific applications that address only one or a portion of its applications, and from vendors that specialize in specific industries in which it provides services, some of which offer cloud-based solutions. These vendors include, without limitation, Anaplan, Inc.; ADP; Coupa Software Inc.; Dayforce, Inc.; Infor, Inc.; Microsoft Corporation; and UKG Inc.
Trademarks
Workday, the Workday logo, Workday Illuminate, VIBE, Peakon, Evisort, HiredScore, VNDLY, and Adaptive Planning are trademarks of Workday.
History
The company was founded in 2005. It was incorporated in Nevada in March 2005 and reincorporated in Delaware in 2012. The company was formerly known as North Tahoe Power Tools, Inc. and changed its name to Workday, Inc. in July 2005.