Innovative Solutions

Cloud computing, because of its versatility and various features, has opened many doors for new businesses. From Microsoft to Amazon, every big company has launched its cloud-based services, and names like Workday Inc. are making big in this field with their innovative ideas on problem-solving for their clients. Workday Inc. is an American on-demand cloud-based service provider that is listed among the top five cloud-based service providers in the world.  

About the Company Workday Inc.

Workday Inc. is headquartered in Pleasanton, California, U.S., and was founded in 2005 by Dave Duffield and Aneel Bhusri. Currently, Duffield is working as the chairman of the company, and Bhusri is serving Workday as the co-Ceo. Workday Inc. is an online software service provider and offers subscription-based services to its clients, according to their interests and requirements. These services include financial management, spend management, analytics, reporting and benchmarking, human capital management, enterprise planning, payroll, and workforce management, etc. The company doesn’t sell its software but services.

Workday Inc. believes in adapting to the changes, so it has always walked together with every new innovation and developed solutions for its clients incorporating the latest technologies. The company’s software includes technologies like machine learning to provide its clients with the best solutions and help them grow with the new technologies. The company always keeps on updating its services according to new technologies arriving and release major updates for its software every six months.

In fifteen years journey of Workday, the company has come up with 34 different products, Amazon Web Services being its major cloud computing infrastructure provider. The company has its various data centers situated in different cities in the world, including Virginia, Dublin, Ireland, Netherlands, and Amsterdam, etc.

The Foundational Story of Workday Inc.

Dave Duffield, the co-founder of Workday Inc., had already founded another company named PeopleSoft and was one of the famous entrepreneurs among his peers. He met Aneel Bhusri when both were working for PeopleSoft. After selling off PeopleSoft, one day, Duffield had a meeting with Bhusri at Jax Truckee Diner, in Lake Tahoe of California. During the meeting, the two decided to start a new SaaS (software as a service) company that would develop and offer cloud-based HR and Finance applications. The idea was to revolutionize the enterprise software market and help companies manage their finances and hr functions through their online services.

So in March 2005, the two launched Workday Inc. in Walnut Creek, California, with an initial investment by Duffield and Greylock Partners, a venture capital firm. Later in 2008, the company headquarters was shifted to Pleasanton, California. Workday partnered with Flextronics in the same year to incorporate human capital management software services into its operations. To enhance its services, Workday also partnered with names like Fairchild Semiconductor, Thomson Reuters, Aviva and Time Warner, etc.

By the mid of the next year, Workday had raised around $75 million through a round of investment led by New Enterprise Associates. By 2011, the company had raised a total of $250 million since its inception, Jeff Bezos (CEO Amazon) being one of the major investors. The company had its first IPO in the New York Stock Exchange in October 2012, raising $637 million by selling 22.75 million Class A shares.    

The Founder of the Company

Dave Duffield is a renowned entrepreneur who is also the founder of the technology company PeopleSoft. The Workday co-founder Aneel Bhusri is also known for his leadership and was associated with PeopleSoft. He was the vice-president of the company.

Dave Duffield has got an electrical engineering degree and has done an MBA from Cornell University. After graduating, he joined IBM as the marketing representative, and later, worked as the systems engineer in the same company. Duffield also worked with Integral Systems and held different positions at the company, including the post of CEO, chairman, and chief product architect. Apart from PeopleSoft and Workday, he is also one of the co-founders of Information Associates. He has won various awards, including the Golden Plate Award (1998), EY Entrepreneur of the Year (2013), and Cornell Engineering Distinguished Alumni Award (2018).

The other co-founder of Workday Inc., Aneel Bhusri, is a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering from Brown University and has done an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business. He started his career at Morgan Stanley as a corporate finance analyst. In 1993 he joined PeopleSoft as the director of planning. After a decade of working for PeopleSoft, he ended up being the vice-chairman of the company. During the same time, he also partnered with the capital venture firm Greylock Partners. He is a recipient of the EY Entrepreneur of the Year (2013) and the Great Place to Work CEO For All Leadership Award (2020).

The Company Today

In fifteen years of its journey, Workday Inc. has become one of the top tech companies in the world. It has also made a few acquisitions to enhance its services. In 2017, the company opened its platform for developers and third-party software to step into the Platform as a Service market. The company has featured among the Fortune magazine’s top 100 companies, that too in the top five companies in 2020. Currently, over 12,500 are working in Workday Inc. at its different branches around the globe.