Workday was founded in 2005 by Dave Duffield and Aneel Bhusri after Oracle’s hostile takeover of PeopleSoft, where Duffield had been CEO. The pair set out to build a modern, cloud-native alternative to legacy HR and finance systems.
The company’s Human Capital Management (HCM) suite covers recruiting, talent management, payroll, benefits, and workforce planning. Workday Financial Management handles accounting, procurement, revenue management, and expense reporting. Both run on a single codebase and data model, which means HR and finance teams share the same source of truth.
Workday Adaptive Planning, acquired through the Adaptive Insights purchase in 2018, gives finance teams tools for budgeting, forecasting, and scenario modeling. It’s used by more than 6,000 organizations independently of the core Workday platform.
The company serves over 10,000 customers, including more than 50% of the Fortune 500. Annual revenue reached $7.2 billion in fiscal year 2024. Subscription revenue makes up roughly 88% of total revenue.
Workday’s architecture is genuinely cloud-native — there’s no on-premises version. The platform uses an in-memory, object-oriented data model that differs from traditional relational databases. Every customer runs on the same version of the software, and Workday pushes updates twice a year.
Carl Eschenbach, former COO of VMware, became co-CEO alongside Bhusri in 2022 before becoming sole CEO in 2024. The company employs over 18,000 people and continues to invest heavily in machine learning features across its product suite.
