Workday, An Exceptional Enterprise Software Case Study

In March 2005, two former managers of PeopleSoft set about redeeming themselves and their team from the cleaven of their transactions during their Oracle acquisition. David Duffield, then Vice President of PeopleSoft, used the experience to stimulate their attempts to succeed in the tech world of companies and Aneel Bhusri, Product Management Chief..

David and Aneel have founded Workday, a company offering software for financial and capital management in a SaaS model. Since 1987, David had founded PeopleSoft almost two decades ago and before its acquisition by Oracle in January 2005, it has developed into the world’s second largest application software company.

In 1993 when he joined PeopleSoft, Aneel Bhusri first met David where he became the company planning chief.. Aneel was born in Pittsford, New York and graduated from Brown University with a baccalaureate, as well as MBA from the Stanford School of Business, New York. He’s an investor in Greylock, a tech investment fund with Facebook, Groupon, Dropbox, Tumblr and Airbnb.

This vibrant pair has a chemical industry and this chemistry has enableDay to rapidly hit $1.0 billion in turnover per quarter, and to become one of the world’s fastest growing tech companies. According to Aneel, their approach still focuses on intensive customers and says “We continue to attract new customers and many of our existing customers are growing with us. Our customer loyalty is still one of the best in business software and our customers’ success is at the very heart of our long-term business plan.”

Moreover, the two are great at deciding which companies to acquire to expand their solution set. A year ago, they acquired Adaptive Insights for $1.55 billion, then an alarming purchase price but now a fantastic bargain. “Q1 was our third quarter with the Adaptive Insights Business Planning Cloud and customer demand continues to reinforce our confidence in the long-term opportunity. We added 150 standalone Adaptive deals and had great success selling to large enterprises, with approximately 50 deals representing both platform sales and Planning add-ons.”

It also helps that cloud-based financial applications are on a big uptake by large corporations. Workday is finding that Fortune 500 companies are following a similar quick adoption pattern with financial software as they did with human resources software five to six years ago. Moreover, cloud is being viewed as the preferred deployment option vesus on-premises.

There are many other reasons why David and Aneel have made Workday into an enterprise software darling, but perhaps core to all of it is they started with their chemistry and deep domain knowledge. From there, they built a fantastic organization around them and stayed focus on serving their customers well, acquiring to expand their solution set and riding the trends in could software adoption.

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