Workday was founded in March 2005 and launched in November 2006. Initially, it was funded by Duffield and venture capital firmGreylock Partners. In December 2008, Workday moved its headquarters from Walnut Creek, California to Pleasanton, California, where PeopleSoft founder Duffield's prior company, was located. On February 6, 2008, Workday announced that it had reached a definitive agreement to purchase Cape Clear Software In May 2008, Workday signed a large contract with Flextronics to provide human capital management software services. Other large, multinational companies that have publicly disclosed contracts or deployments of Workday include Aviva, Chiquita Brands, CAE Inc., Fairchild Semiconductor, Rentokil Initial, Thomson Reuters, and Time Warner. On April 29, 2009, Workday announced that it secured $75 million in funding led by New Enterprise Associates. Existing investors Greylock Partners and Workday CEO and co‑founder Dave Duffield also participated in the round. On October 24, 2011, Workday announced $85 million in new funding, bringing total capital raised to $250 million. Investors in the latest round included T. Rowe Price, Morgan Stanley Investment Management, Janus, and Bezos Expeditions, the personal investment entity of Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos. As of spring 2012, Workday had 310 customers, ranging from mid-sized businesses to Fortune 500 companies. In October 2012, Workday launched its initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange with ticker symbol WDAY. Its shares were priced at $28 and ended trading Friday, October 12, at $48.69, "propelled the start-up to a market capitalization of nearly $9.5 billion including unexercised stock options." It sold 22.75 million Class A shares, raising $637 million. The IPO raised more cash than any launch in the U.S. technology sector since Facebook's $16 billion IPO in May 2012. Its shares surged 74% in their IPO, underscoring investor interest in cloud computing. In 2018 Workday acquired Filip Doušek's company Stories.bi. The CEO of Workday is Aneel Bhusri, who is a partner with Greylock Partners and handled senior leadership positions earlier in his career at PeopleSoft. Dave Duffield serves as the Chairman of the Board.
Business model
Workday makes money by selling subscriptions to its services rather than selling the software outright. Expenses are booked up front when it signs on a new customer but the associated revenue is recognized over the life of multiyear agreements. In first quarter 2016, Workday announced annual revenue in excess of $1 billion for the first time ever in fiscal year 2016.
Corporate governance
Duffield holds voting rights to Workday shares that were worth $3.4 billion and Bhusri held rights to shares valued at $1.3 billion. Collectively, they hold 67% of the company's voting shares. This voting structure makes the event of a hostile takeover much less likely.
Product
Workday has released 34 updates to its product line as of March, 2020, its most recent being "2020 R1". It releases a major update every 6 months, every September and March Workday operates data centers located in Ashburn, Virginia; Lithia Springs, Georgia; Portland, Oregon; Dublin, Ireland; Amsterdam, Netherlands; and also uses Amazon Web Services for its primary computing infrastructure platforms in order to accelerate its worldwide expansion. In February 2014, Workday acquired the startup Identified and its artificial intelligenceSyman to create its Insight Apps line of products. The first products running SYMAN were announced at Workday Rising 2014. In July 2017, Workday CEO Aneel Bhusri announced that the company had decided to open up its platform to developers, partners and third party software. As a result, Workday will enter the Platform as a Service market. Bhusri said the move will allow customers to build custom extensions and applications to work with Workday. In January 2018, Workday announced that it acquired SkipFlag, makers of an AI knowledge base that builds itself from a company's internal communications.
