Workday Update – Move to HTML5, Financials Almost There

Earlier today Saugatuck Technology participated in an Analyst briefing with Workday. Find below some key takeaways from the briefing:

Mobility – this is clearly a key area of focus going forward, given accelerating adoption of iPhones and iPads among senior executives / managers in Workday’s client base. Workday identified a significant number of enhancements in support of smart phones and tablets. Among them, they are now beginning to leverage HTML5 for interface development – which will potentially serve as the backbone for cross-platform tablet support (i.e., Apple, Android).

Financials – Workday indicated that they are now beyond building out the basic capabilities, and focusing on adding key / important features and functions. Examples that provided included supplier contract enhancements and advanced asset management enhancements.

Interestingly, they noted four recent wins with their Financials (e.g., Guggenheim Partners, AAA of Northern California, Nevada and Utah, Chuck E Cheese, Sallie Mae). However, after looking on Workday’s website, it is clear that HCM and Payroll continue to be the leading revenue drivers for the company, as all of the Financials client examples also have Workday’s HCM or HCM/Payroll offerings installed.

Saugatuck would estimate that roughly 5-10% of Workday’s 280 customers are either deploying or using Financials, in one way, shape or form. Financials might now be “beyond the initial build-out” – however, they are clearly not yet fleshed out enough to lead a sale, as all of the examples noted above also are HCM clients.

Performance – Workday indicated significant performance improvements such that it now takes only 3 hours to run payroll for a company with as many as 100,000 employees. Very impressive indeed.

Net/Net: Among our progressive, large-enterprise clients, Workday is clearly gaining visibility and traction for its core HCM value-prop. At the same time, our street checks indicate that Workday will likely gain significant traction with Financials once they are fully fleshed-out and truly prime-time -- even though Cloud-based Financials and other money-focused systems will largely lag front-office systems such as CRM, Service, Collaboration and HCM through the planning horizon . . . We will continue to monitor their progress in this area as a leading indicator of large-enterprise adoption of core systems of record beyond HCM.