Workday reported its fourth-quarter and full-year 2016 results on Monday and the numbers pleased Wall Street. The company said it had $436.7 million in revenue during Q4, a rise of 35 percent year-over-year, and $0.7 per share in profits on a non-GAAP basis, beating analysts' expectations. For the full year, Workday logged $1.57 billion in revenue, a jump of 35 percent year-over-year and said it's on track to hit $2 billion in 2017.
The full details on the numbers are available in Workday's earnings press release, but on the earnings conference call executives and analysts discussed items of more interest for customers and the industry in general. Here's a look (with thanks to Seeking Alpha for the transcript).
You can find additional disclosers regarding these non-GAAP measures including reconciliations with comparable GAAP results, in our earnings press release and on the Investor Relations page of our website.
Big wins in HCM: Every software vendor will tout customer wins but Workday has some extra bragging rights, having landed no less than Wal-Mart as an HCM customer. Other big wins in HCM during Q4 were Deutsche Bank, BP and Dow Chemical. In addition, 136 of the Fortune 500 are using Workday HCM, CEO Aneel Bhusri said on the call. Needless to say, these are good references for Workday to have and should also give prospects some additional comfort.
Sales org shakeup: Workday has named Chano Fernandez to the position of EVP of global field operations. There's an important strategic reason for the promotion, Bhusri said on the call:
As we have grown larger as the company is become evident that we need to constantly adjust our organizations, stay nimble and focused on our key objectives. To that end, we have now clearly divided our North American business into two groups, large enterprise and medium enterprise. While we’ve had separation of the account executive level between large and medium enterprise for some time, we are now taking all the way to the senior sales leadership at a national level and bringing the same approach to the services organization as well.
Platfora becomes PRISM: Workday acquired Platfora, a big data discovery and analytics platform, last year and announced plans to release a new product called PRISM Analytics based on its technology. PRISM will give customers the ability to analyze and combine information from both Workday and third-party systems. Workday is "right on schedule" with delivering PRISM in the second half of this year, Bhusri said.
Planning begets financials: Workday now has 320 core financials customers. Bhusri turned aside a suggestion that the business had grown more slowly than Workday had hoped. He also argued that momentum in Workday's financial planning software will drive core financials deals down the line:
We are two quarters into it and we have 111 planning customers. ... The planning is well ahead of where we thought it would be and is clearly hitting a pain point around the budgeting, planning and forecasting area.
I mentioned that five companies are -- five Fortune 500 companies have signed up for planning those includes Wal-Mart, Nationwide, Stryker and Netflix. Those are big names and for us it's a great way to again, we have got HCM, we have got planning, we are really well-positioned to run the tables within that enterprise when they do move their transactional platform as well.
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