Workday is a business productivity tool designed for companies looking to improve employee performance. It helps managers monitor and evaluate their team member’s performance, and provides insight into the overall health of the organization.
Have you ever thought about how Workday makes money? Is it profitable? How can this business survive amongst fierce competition from Oracle and Sap? If yes, then this article will give you answers to these questions.
Workday operates on an annual revenue cycle. Its primary source of income comes from recurring monthly payments made by customers who subscribe to its software. These monthly fees cover the cost of developing new features and updating existing ones. In addition, Workday earns additional revenue through professional services fees charged by consultants hired to implement customized solutions based on the needs of individual companies.
Let’s see how they generate revenue from each product/service offered.
Let’s get started!
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About Workday
Workday, Inc., headquartered in Pleasanton, California, provides enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications for small businesses and large enterprises. Its products include Workday Accounting, Workday Human Resources, Workday CRM, Workday Project Management, Workday Supply Chain Management, Workday Financials, and Workday Analytics. Workday was founded in 2003 and raised $100 million in venture funding. In 2014, Workday acquired SuccessFactors, an ERP provider based in San Mateo, California.
Workday provides software products for HCM, Finance, and EPM.
Its HCM solutions include its core human resource (HR) applications for talent acquisition, retention, development, motivation, and performance measurement.
It currently offers products including:
- Workday Human Capital Management
- Workday Financial Management
- Spending control systems – simplify the way companies manage their spending.
- Business intelligence (BI) tools for business analysts and decision-makers
- Process automation tools
- Cloud integration for app developers – makes it easier to integrate their apps into different clouds.
- Student information system software
- Enterprise business planning software
Revenue Streams of Workday
Workday provides business applications for managing payrolls, finances, people, and projects. Its clients include companies ranging from small startups to large enterprises.
Workday provides its software primarily to business clients via a Software as a Service (SaaS) delivery model. It currently serves over 8,000 clients worldwide.
It has an open architecture that allows partners to develop and deploy a wide variety of applications, from professional services to business intelligence tools to connectors to on-premise databases.
With its robust technology platform, Workday provides customers with a clear economic advantage because they only pay for the software they usually use.
Workday’s Value Proposition
Workday’s mass market business model includes several value propositions, such as productivity, accessibility, status, convenience, and quality. Clients benefit from a large range of Workday’s product offerings, due to its strategic acquisitions.
As a result, Workday acquired platforms like Upshot, Zaption, and GridCraft. It then diversified its service offerings and overall capabilities.
It provides business solutions that help companies streamline their daily operations. Clients benefit from real taneous reports and the availability of analytical tools.
With a 99.9 percent uptime, Workday keeps its systems running smoothly. It also ensures security and protects customer data by releasing updates every two years.
Its brand has been built up by its stellar reputation, high customer satisfaction rates, and overall success.
Workday offers its services to thousands of companies worldwide. Some of these clients are large multinational corporations, while others are small startups
- Sony Corporation
- Johnson & Johnson
- Warner Music Group
- Electronic Arts
- Adobe
- Visa Inc.
- Toyota
- Church & Dwight
The software vendor‘s value proposition has attracted some notable corporate customers and several awards. Workday was named a leader by Gartner in its 2019 HCM Magic Quadrant report for midmarket and large organizations.
Investors see the company’s offering as attractive because it provides SaaS solutions that address key business challenges faced by midsize and large corporations.
Many top companies use Workday’s applications to help their employees manage expenses and payroll.
The business solution provider offers dashboard software designed to help managers supervise their teams remotely. These companies also use the software for enterprise planning, human resources, and expense management.
Meanwhile, educational institutions and school districts can use Workday‘s platform and products to help students study remotely. Likewise, they can use Workday“s products for their HR needs.
Remotely managing teachers and administrators is made easier by these tools.
Is Workday (WDAY) Making Money?
Founded in March 2004, Zoho was one of the first companies to recognize the potential of the cloud computing market. As a result, their stock price has risen since then. From $35.98 per share in December 2009 to $88.24 per share today.
Its revenue increased by approximately 19.62% in Q2 2020. According to reports, it earned $777.69 million profit in July 2020 compared to $691.52 million profit in January 2020.
In 2019, WorkDay enrolled an increased number of corporate customers. These customers contributed to the software developer’s revenues. They surpassed expectations for the fiscal period. The company earned 85% of its total income from subscription fees, which rose by 34.3%.
According to analysts, the rise in subscription rates has been attributed to a widespread shift to online business apps. These apps allow companies to perform various operations, from payroll to human resource management.
Given this background, Salesforce has been working tirelessly to become a one-stop solution for business applications. Hence, they acquired the software developer Adaptive Insights in 2017.
For 2020, the vendor raised its estimate for subscription revenues by approximately $1.8 billion from last year. The new projection was significantly higher than analyst estimates.
Workday’s projections got a big boost when their new major corporate clients were announced, including Procter & Gamble P&G, Carl Zeiss AG ZEISS, Old Mutual Ltd OLDM, and Cisco Systems CSCO.
Despite these challenges, the company remains optimistic about the future. Its outlook is bolstered by an uptick in cloud migration activity.
Business Model of Workday
Despite its competition from larger companies such as SAP and Oracle and despite its smaller size, Workday continues to record significant subscription gains.
Its innovative software solutions help companies manage their people effectively and efficiently, without disrupting their daily operations.
However, increasing investments in R&D come at a price. The company may suffer from decreased profits due to additional expenses in marketing and products.
Despite Workday’s massive debt load, its management argued that the company would benefit from the acquisition of Adaptive Insight because it will allow Workday to speed up the development of its business planning products.
The company plans to use Adaptive Insights’ advanced analytic and modeling capabilities. Enhanced modeling and analysis should help Workday’s financial software gain traction among corporate customers.
Innovative Products
The vendor is trying to increase revenues by offering additional services such as financial management software.
During the fourth quarter of 2017 (the last three months), Workday welcomed more than fifty new financial accounting software customers. Two of these customers were Fortune 500 companies.
Software vendors added three new key components to their financial management solutions in 2018. These included:
- Workday Prism Analytics
- Workday Planning
- Workday Benchmarking
After attracting the attention of top companies such as Race Truck Petroleum, Sprout Farmers Market, and Rivera, the company was able to attract the attention of even bigger companies like Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and Nestle.
Workday further enhanced its business applications’ appeal by introducing an integrated solution for managing the entire enterprise’s procurement processes.
Workday is helping some of the world’s largest corporations transition to cloud-based financial applications. Many large enterprises remain reluctant to adopt cloud-based business applications.
Workday has found it relatively easy to compete against existing vendors like SAP and Oracle by building an enterprise-grade SaaS solution for their workforce management needs.
It shouldn’t be surprising that Workday’s growth rate has been accelerating for years now. Most new ERP spending goes toward using the company’s software in the “as a service” (SaaS) format.
On one hand, a recent Gartner award for Workday shows its increasing influence in the human capital management (HCM) space.
Workday has notable clientele including Qualcomm, Humana, CitiMGI, and others. The most impressive thing is that the list of companies using Workday keeps growing as cloud migration gains momentum.
Delighting Customers
One of the factors contributing to Workday’s success has been its high customer satisfaction rating. In 2020, the company had a 97% customer satisfaction rating.
Analysts believe this is an important factor that determines whether Workday’s business model is successful.
Business Model Resilience
Analysts expect Workday to be able to withstand tough times because of its strong business model. As a result, they say the company could grow at an average rate of 20% for the next few years.
Investors can expect the firm to retain its attractiveness as a long-term investable asset.
Workday’s model has allowed them to become one of the most disruptive companies on the market. They maintain steady FCF profitability.
It achieved impressive revenue and profit margins through effective marketing and sales tactics, a high customer satisfaction rating, and other factors. Those factors certainly drove significant margin improvement.
Its business model involves targeting its customer bases, allowing vendors to improve their operational resilience. As a consequence, they can lower their marketing expenses while increasing revenues from additional sales options. Over the last few years, these additional sales options have increased, helping Workday to optimize its net retention rate.
The add-on company has just recorded its first-ever $1 billion in quarterly revenues. It represents an annualized 23% rise from last year’s figures.
A combination of a stronger existing and new client basis, including additional services, makes it easier for Workday to maintain a revenue increase of 20% or higher. It is not surprising that Wall Street sees an upward trend in margins. The company has room to grow its margins above expectations.
One of Workday’s key components for growth potential is its software license model. The company uses a per-seat pricing structure that is significantly robust and resilient, allowing it to grow at a faster rate than competitors.
This strategy ensures predictability in the revenues expected from individual sales. It uses a license model that only recognizes changes in the total user count per client contract. Clients sign agreements for a minimum value adjustable at renewal.
With Workday licenses, there are also measures to minimize issues for companies due to employee changes that affect the per-user price structure. Combining fixed prices with annual contracts minimizes volatility, limiting the downside for both parties. Customers can renew their contracts at any time without having to pay an additional fee.
Conclusion: How Does Workday Make Money?
Workday is a cloud-based software provider that offers human resources (HR) and financial management services to small and large organizations alike. It operates using the SaaS model and generates revenue through subscription fees for its products and services.
They use their proprietary cloud software along together with their live chat service and on-call tech help to provide their clients with exceptional services that let them streamline their business operations with services such as Time Management, Human Resource Automation, Performance Management, Payroll, Big Data Analytics, and Financial Applications.
Now that we’ve covered all the important points, here’s an overview of the company. They provide a software platform for managing finances and HR. It is one of their most dynamic companies and has been growing rapidly since its founding in 2005.
Workday strives hard toward achieving the position of the top company for enterprise HR software.
We think that companies like these will eventually replace the traditional applications that are currently being utilized by most organizations today.
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