Workday, Inc. (NASDAQ:WDAY) Goldman Sachs Communacopia & Technology Conference September 5, 2023 6:05 PM ET
Company Participants
Carl Eschenbach – Co-CEO
Conference Call Participants
Kash Rangan – Goldman Sachs
Carl Eschenbach
So I don’t think you need an introduction to Carl Eschenbach at all.
Carl Eschenbach
What were you Kash?
Kash Rangan
Carl’s been a COO, been a – how many of you know somebody who’s been a – who is a CEO, and has been a COO and a CFO and a Venture Capitalist? Anybody knows anybody? No. Okay, so there you go. That is truly unique about that, I just thought about it. How many people have worn these multiple hats and it’s only one person that I know.
Carl Eschenbach
I don’t know if that’s a good thing or bad thing, but I have done a lot. I am very fortunate. I had a blessed career and I’m super excited to be here with you Kash and Gilli [ph]. Thanks for having me.
Unidentified Analyst
Thank you.
Kash Rangan
So if you were Zane, the CFO of the company. My boss has been a CFO. We have Zane sitting in the audience somewhere. He’s somewhere here, but – yes, there he is.
Carl Eschenbach
Yes, he hid in the back. But say do you have any questions for me that I want to deflect, they are all going to Zane. He can sit as far back as he wants, but he’s still going to get him.
Kash Rangan
Exactly. The free cash flow margin to non-GAAP operating margin percentage bridge?
Carl Eschenbach
No, we should be okay.
Kash Rangan
So Carl, thank you so much and congratulations. I think we met many, many years back. I think it was 2007. That was the year. It was at the IPO of VMware and Aneel had started Workday in 2005.
Did you ever know? Do you ever think you could be running an application software company when you were running up the business operations of VMware? Never.
Carl Eschenbach
No, I probably didn’t right. And I didn’t – I knew of Aneel obviously from his PeopleSoft days and all of this success he had, and then the launching of Workday. I was very familiar with it. In fact, speaking of CFOs, Aneel who I love dearly and is my partner now, sold at the time, my CFO, my Chief Accounting Officer and my Investor Relation.
Kash Rangan
That’s right.
Carl Eschenbach
All within two weeks to take Workday public. So that was – that’s unfortunately how I became CFO for a while and they went public. And I was upset with them, but not no more. He’s a great partner and I’m great to be on the journey with him.
Kash Rangan
And you stole his future CEO as well from VMware, it sounds like.
Carl Eschenbach
Yes, that’s probably true. I don’t know.
Question-and-Answer Session
Q – Kash Rangan
It’s great. Aneel, if you’re listening, it’s all good stuff. This is fantastic. So Carl, you’ve been even on this journey before. You are no stranger to technology. But Workday is an application software company. How do you look at this company five years from now. Let’s say you come back to the 2028 Goldman Sachs conference and we’ll put you on the – this is a beautiful stage by the way. But some clients asked me, so how come Carl’s not on the bigger stage? We’ll definitely get you on the bigger stage.
So what does company look like five years from now? What do you want it to look like five years?
Carl Eschenbach
Yes. So let me start with why I’m excited. Maybe Kash, and why I jumped back in after an amazing seven year journey at Sequoia. And what I learned in those seven years and combined that with my 30 years of operating experience before I went into, if you will, Sequoia.
Now I actually think the transition from VMware to Sequoia was a good one. I think I’m a better operator, a more skilled executive and leader at this point. And I have really enjoyed my first nine months here at Workday.
I’m not new to Workday, in the sense that I was on the Board for five years. I spent five years on the Board, so I knew the company. Obviously, I knew Aneel. I knew a lot of the leadership team. A lot of them worked with me in the past. And then I was always part of helping recruit some new leaders to the company.
So, I – it’s not like it was new to me. And I will tell you the one thing that attracted me to Workday and still is very much attracted to me, now nine months later, is the culture. Aneel and Dave built an amazing culture at Workday over the last 18 years and it’s one that I always thought was powerful and the foundation for everything Workday does. And indeed, now, nine months later, I can tell you that it’s true.
And now, having this experience both on the venture side and the operational side, I think about Workday in three different categories. Number one, the strategy of the company to your question, where are we going? I think about innovation and how we continue to innovate. If we’re not innovating every single day, both organically and inorganically and on the go-to-market side, right?
I always say, if the world’s innovating faster than you are outside your company, then you are – inside your company death is near. So we need to always be innovating. And then lastly, we need to execute. And execution is very simply defined as a discipline of getting things done and I think we’re executing very well.
And if I look out five years from now, I think the vision we have to be the digital enterprise backbone, right that supports companies, two most important assets. There people in their finance to a full platform approach, being able to do planning, execute and analyze it, all under the same architecture. I think that’s where we’re going to differentiate ourselves, both today and in the future.
So I think we’re very well positioned in both good times and bad. Despite whether you have a head winner or a tailwind, I think Workday is very, very much positioned in a good place at this point and going forward. We’re very unique, and that the business is highly resilient. It’s a highly resilient business. We have over 5,000 core customers. We have 10,000 total when you combine it with our planning product.
We have a great go-to-market motion in landing net new customers with a nice balance of selling back into that installed base. So it’s highly resilient because of the diversity of the business. And if we can continue this motion we have today by becoming that full platform for the enterprise support those two mission critical assets, I think the future is quite bright.
Kash Rangan
That’s great. And people tell me that – this does not surprise me at the least at all. It’s a fresh breath of energy at Workday. It’s like all of sudden some new clarity, some new energy, and people are fired up, really fired up, fired up even more. I mean Aneel fired people up as well, but now they are even more fired up.
My question for you was, despite all the macro pressures, you were one of the very few companies that actually did not have to lower your guide and what not. Is it just the execution under the Carl Eschenbach effect or is there something else to the Workday product portfolio and how important you are, that it’s allowed you to be a more consistent performer than many others who have to take it down their guidance and take down their numbers?
Carl Eschenbach
First Kash, it’s not the Carl Eschenbach effect. Hopefully I have some impact in partnering with a Aneel , but Workday is way bigger than an individual at this point. There’s no doubt I don’t, I know enough about myself. I am probably energetic and optimistic about everything and really focus on driving energy. I think energy and enthusiasm are contagious, so I do like to operate in that way. But there’s no way our company at Workday is performing at the level because of one person, I’ll say that right up front. It’s because of my 18,000 workmates around the world and my partnership with Aneel.
And I’ll go back to why I think it’s resilient. I say we’re highly resilient because we have a diversified customer base, a diversified go-to-market and that is extremely durable. If you look at our retention rates, if you look at our upsell, cross-sell capabilities back into our customer base and then yet landing net new customers, it’s one of a kind in the software industry today.
And I think despite some of those headwinds that you’re talking about, our value proposition is only strengthening. Why? Because people are focused on creating a new level of productivity through their employees, giving them a different experience, and if you do that, I think ultimately what happens, you have lower attrition, so your people stay with you longer, they’re much more loyal and your productivity continues to rise.
At the same time, when you’re dealing with an uncertain macro, there’s a lot of changes that someone like Zane or other CFOs happens to deal with. And having a platform that will allow you to run scenarios and do planning, regardless of what’s happening in the economy, is something that’s highly valuable. And as people now start to think about their financials that traditionally have been on-premises and now moving to the Cloud, I think that gives us a unique market opportunity too.
And then the last thing I’d say is, as we continue to work with customers, both existing customers and new customers, they are not looking for Workday to deliver a solution, they want a platform. And what I mean by that, as we are more and more selling full platform, both HCM and financials, at time of sale to customers and wrapping planning around it, and that’s definitely something that we see picking up momentum in the market.
Kash Rangan
And on that very thought right, so Workday’s got a lot of products and many of them organically develop, some through acquisition. How do you simplify the product portfolio and make it so tangible for the customer that you remove more and more of the friction? One might naturally introduce as you expand the product portfolio, which is more reasons for the customers to say, no, maybe this, maybe not that. How do you simplify that buying process?
Carl Eschenbach
Yes, it’s a great question Kash. I’ll answer it two different ways. First, traditionally we’ve landed with an HCM product or an app. You called it an app or financial there’s an app. But I think more and more were being seen as a platform company. And more and more people are taking a lot of those best of breed solutions they bought over the last three to five years when you saw this hyper-growth in new products, new offerings from the startup community. And now they are consolidating them on this platform that we have, whether it’s financials or HCM. So there’s a consolidation happening and I think we have a strong total cost of ownership message for our customers and – both existing customers and new.
Now to answer your question, we do have a lot of skews. And we sell them, as a one-off SKU every single time. And we’re going to an exercise internally right now to figure out how can we remove the friction between our sales organization, our channel and our customers to be able to sell more sweets, sell more holistic platform solutions as opposed to one-off SKUs.
Now, if you’re an existing customer, one of the things we have going for us right now, we have this notion of selling back into the base. We have two different sales force. We have a sales force that lands net new customers, and then when it’s landed it passed over to a customer-based team and they drive additional SKUs.
So the customer-based team is very quickly driving a significant, uplift in our customer-based through selling them, these additional SKUs, but it’s still one in a time. And we’re going to move to suits and packaging in the next 12 to 18 months to reduce the friction between us and the customers.
Kash Rangan
Got it.
Unidentified Analyst
Yes, I mean touching on that Carl, thanks so much for spending the time with us today. I think, you know we’ll talk about HR definitely a lot today. But one of the questions I actually had was around ERP and that full platform that you were just talking about. I think that ERP has been laagered in penetration to Cloud and that migration, and especially now with digital transformation and tight IT budgets. What do you see as being the unlock and allowing customers to really be ready to make that step and choose Workday in doing so?
Carl Eschenbach
Yes, it is a great observation. We just went through a study where we looked at the percentage of ERP or FINs that’s still on premises versus the Clouds. And right now we estimate – both our estimation in the industry as a whole, estimate somewhere only between 20% and 25% of workloads have moved to the Cloud. So that just shows you the size and scope of the opportunity.
And listen, I think rightfully so, you’re CFOs are conservative right. They are not open as much as people in the HR community to take a system of reference and put it in the Cloud.
[Cross Talk]
Kash Rangan
That’s Zane.
Carl Eschenbach
Zane’s the best. Like yeah – he’s conservative, but he’s great. I’m so lucky he’s here. Thank you.
But I think they are conservative when it comes to moving financials, a system of record to the cloud. So I think we’re in the early days of this shift to the cloud. And to be frank, our competition is helping us. In the sense that they are asking their customers to move all premises and move into the cloud. And when that happens, we get to see that the table to have a discussion with those potential prospects to deploy the Workday if you will, financial platform.
If they are an existing HCM customer from Workday, there’s even a higher entity for us to sell, a full platform to your point in rap planning around it. So we’re in our early days of this financial movement, which is why we as a company are investing quite heavily in the go-to-market side and building out a sizable FINs direct sales force, incremental to the other people who sell everything.
Unidentified Analyst
That was so interesting. And I guess that begs the question around Generative AI and when we think about the opportunity in front of Workday, and the sheer amount of data that you have around the workforce and the knowledge workers all around the world, how is that helping you, both within HR and ERP and the go-to market motion that you are just talking about?
Carl Eschenbach
So listen, this is a revolutionary technology, right. It’s a major technology, probably like we haven’t seen in the last 30, 40 years, and I think first people need to lean into it. But they also want to lean into something that’s safe, that’s ethical and responsible as well.
Now when I think about this AI movement, I think about, what is the output of Generative AI or AI or machine learning and I think it’s only as good as the input. And I think this is where we have a really big differentiation. We have over 16 million contracted users on our platform. And we’re processing last year, 600 million right, transactions a year through our platform.
So when people talk about a large language model, I call ours an enterprise large language model that no one else had. In a multi-tenant cloud, same architecture, same code base all the time. So we have the ability to train off of a very large LLM that others don’t have. And we can drive business outcomes for our customers, like skills. We focus on how do we look at skills as opposed to jobs or job breadth? How do we do talent optimization? How do we give people a journey?
So we have all of this AI ML deeply built into the platform for the last 10 years. At the same time, we also announced via our Extend product, what we call an ML gateway, a machine learning gateway. So if people want to take an outside LLM, integrate it into Workday, we’ll allow them to do it, so whether it’s from one of the hyperscalers or open AI or anyone else.
So we are leaning into it. We think quite frankly we’re already monetizing. I know a lot of people asked the question, is how do you monetize Generative AI? What are you going to do? We believe we’re already monetizing it. Look at it to our competitive win rates versus our competition, and we look at it to our renewal rates. We look at it to customer satisfaction, and all of those are at company historic levels right now, because we have it built in from day one.
Now, that doesn’t mean we’re not going to bring new SKUs if you will or offerings to market and we’re going to monetize them, but we’re not going to do it every single time. But we don’t want to do to our customers is nickel and dime them and say, every time we add some additional capabilities around AI or Generative AI, we’re going to charge them. They do pay us a subscription fee every year. They pay us an innovation index uplift at time of renewal. So we want to make sure we’re giving to our customers.
Now that’s going to take away from our compute capacity or impact the OpEx on our end, like bringing in an outside LLM, we will find a way to monetize that.
So we’re going to really think through the monetization strategy. But I would say we’re already monetizing it. If you look at some of the areas that I’ve talked about, competitive win rates, renewal rates and customer satisfaction on the Workday platform.
But we are unique, we have a large data set that no one else has. Our competition has on-premise. They have in the cloud. They have single tenant, some multitenant. They have hybrid. We have a multi-tenant cloud. Everyone on the same code base that we’ve been training off for years and that number only expanded. The 600 million transactions I talked about this year, that’s up from 450 million last year, a pretty good data set to train from.
Kash Rangan
So if you’re on-prem, you don’t need a co-pilot right. If you’re on the Cloud, you need a co-pilot. I’m just trying to be funny guys, come on. On-prem doesn’t makes sense, right okay.
Carl Eschenbach
That was good. All right, now I get it. Sorry, I didn’t get it at first. Oh yes, we are in the cloud. We’re going to go to cloud.
Kash Rangan
Going for the part, do you need a co-pilot? There are different software companies that have announced pricing for AI. Some of them like 60% uplift, and other companies $30 per user per month. Those seem quite high. I really wish all these companies are able to get the price realized by the marketplace, but what you’re talking about is a different way of monetizing. So how do you get paid?
I know that you – your customers expect you to provide some level of that AI functionality in the product itself. Are we to see a reconstituting of the product line and you have financials AI plus version or financials without AI or do you just say, if you want financials, it’s going to come with x, y and z and the price is this. Whereas the previous price, it’s not comparison, because it’s apples and oranges. How are you thinking about how you get paid?
Carl Eschenbach
Yes, I think Kash that I was trying to articulate, it’s a combination of both right? We believe we owe our customers some innovation in a platform like the team and Aneel, Sayan runs product and technology done for the last 18 years. And they do pay us and they pay us an increase every year for that innovation. So we will monetize it through, what I was articulating earlier.
At the same time, if we see opportunities, for example, we have a product called Talent Optimization, right. That is based on our Skills Cloud and that’s 100% AI ML driven. It’s a new SKU, we’ve optimized for it. We are charging for it and it’s one of the fastest SKU’s we’ve ever had.
So it’s going to be a balance of both. But you’re not going to just see us come out and say point blank, here’s a FINs plus or ATM plus and here’s a big uplift on one product or the other. We’re going to be smart about it and we’ll share a little bit more about the innovation around AI and Generative AI at our Rising Conference in three weeks from today, here at San Francisco.
Kash Rangan
Yes, got to put a plug. I should tell myself. When is Rising? You said three weeks from now?
Carl Eschenbach
Three weeks from today, we kick off Rising at Moscone.
Kash Rangan
Excellent. Yes, thank you for clearing that out.
Carl Eschenbach
We expect to have 15,000 of our closest friends and partners who trust us with their most precious data in town.
Kash Rangan
That’s great. I’m looking forward to it. It’s not – we’ve not had Rising in San Francisco for a while.
Carl Eschenbach
Obviously, the COVID.
Kash Rangan
Due to the pandemic. Yes, exactly, exactly.
Carl Eschenbach
Sure.
Kash Rangan
I wanted to get your thoughts on – I could go in multiple directions. It’s such a fascinating conversation. But HR, there is a view that it’s mature. Do you have a different view on maybe what the definition of maturity is? Maybe there is more innovation to come from Workday. How do you know that?
Carl Eschenbach
It’s a great question Kash, and to be honest, when I was thinking about taking Aneel up on the amazing offer to partner with him and serve here at Workday. A lot of people said, Workday? Like, aren’t they mature? Aren’t they grown? Is there growth? Is there opportunity? And one of the things that excites me most about Workday as we sit here today, is that opportunity, right? We’re less than 10% penetrated even on HCM in the market. And if you go international, it’s less than 5%. And I think what people do is, a lot of times they look at Workday. We have…
Kash Rangan
[Cross Talk] the number of seats, right?
Carl Eschenbach
Yes exactly. If you look at Workday, we have 50% in the Fortune 500. And we have 25% of the global 2,000. People say the market sold out and I remind people, that’s 2,500 accounts in the world. And one has 50% opportunity and that the other had 75%.
If you look at the incremental opportunity, especially in some of the verticals we’re going after, state, local governments. 13 states across U.S. had made decisions to go full platform transformation. That’s a lot of opportunity.
You look at our penetration in healthcare. You look at our penetration in retail and hospitality, which just became our second $1 billion ARR vertical after financials, it’s huge. And then you look at two other areas that we’re investing heavily in. It’s our international opportunity. We get 25% of our revenue outside of the U.S., including Canada. 75% is from right here in the U.S. and that kind of goes along with the Fortune 500 and the Global 2K penetration, but we have a tremendous opportunity internationally.
And then we also have a really unique opportunity that’s playing out quite well, that the company has focused on and we call it the medium enterprise. We have the large enterprise if you will, segment, and we have the medium enterprise segment as we’ve gone down market, and that is one of our fastest growing market segments.
It was started and launch here in the U.S. Based on the success we have here in the U.S. we’re taking and replicating that across into international markets. So we’re really excited about that as we’ve gone down market. Not into the SMB, but the medium enterprise. And the interesting thing there Kash is, we’ve gone down market into the medium enterprise. Those customers have a tendency to buy full platform. And I’m not talking full platform HCM or full platform FIN. They bought the true full platform and they were planning around it, that’s a huge opportunity for us as well.
So when people say, is there opportunity? I just share some of that to get me excited. That’s what gets the company excited, it’s what gets the partners excited. There’s plenty of runway for us to find growth.
Now listen, a lot of the initiatives we’re putting in place like new partner programs to leverage partners more than we ever have, the international build out, focus on the medium enterprise, incremental resources to go after the FINs, these things don’t play out in the first six months of this year, right. But we’re starting to see signs and evidence of our pipeline in these certain areas. They are starting to grow, which tells us, let’s keep leaning into some of the hiring we’re doing.
Kash Rangan
Got it.
Carl Eschenbach
So there’s opportunity.
Kash Rangan
You have this habit of reading my question. The next question is going to be hiring. So you finished with hiring, and I wanted to ask you two things. When you look at your customers and they’ve got 60 million people on the payroll. Are you noticing any trends who are hiring industry, technology that went through layoffs and such? Are we at a point where your customers are feeling, you know what, maybe Jan Hatzius, the Chief Economist of Goldman Sachs has been right all along, and he’s been saying, eh! Recession, not so sure about that. Maybe you should have listened to him and started to invest in strategic initiatives and maybe – or maybe I’m just making this up. But this is the truth, right?
Where do you see your customers and where do you see yourself? If you have customers are starting to hire, would you also consider ramping up hiring? I mean that would be a very non-consensus thing, because the industry is like oh, got to show profits and it’s just good, right. But then if growth were to come back, do you have enough people? Do you need to sort of hire?
Carl Eschenbach
So I’ll go backwards, just because it’s top of mind on hiring. We continue to hire at Workday. Specifically we’re focused on two areas, right, that’s our product and technology organization. Especially when it comes to AI and ML, Aneel and Sayan are doing an amazing job as they are recruiting there.
At the same time we are investing in go-to-market. Because of some of those opportunities that I spoke about earlier, we are investing in the go-to-market side, quota capacity bearing people we continue to invest in, especially around FIN. So we are hiring where we see opportunity. We’re being smart about it, right. We’re being measured. We’re not going to over hire, but we are continuing to hire and we’re attracting amazing talents.
If I can say so Kash, I feel like right now at Workday, we’re a little bit of a magnet for great talent. We can attract people like Zane, a brand new CMO, Emma, who’s now leading. Emma Chalwin and came from Salesforce. Ran all of marketing, field marketing globally for them, demand. We hired a whole bunch of you know…
Kash Rangan
I hear they were able to attract a CEO.
Carl Eschenbach
Yes exactly, I don’t know. I’m super grateful to be here. But we are hiring and I feel like we’re a magnet. We have people boomeranging and coming back, so we’re doubling down because we see the opportunity and we’re just getting some amazing talent. People to run operations. People like the new CIO we hired and Rani, this lady’s amazing. We hired new people to run our federal business and services. So we’re getting world-class talent to join us, so we are hiring.
As far as what we’re seeing from our customers. We did see – we have a recruiting tool on top of Workday, so we can kind of gauge what’s going on. We saw a slight slowdown in hiring from Q1 to Q2 in our recruiting platform. In the U.S. alone, we actually recruited 22% of all jobs in the U.S. in the May timeframe. That’s how active our platform is, so we get a good insight on what’s going on in the market.
I think what people are really trying to do is not focus on just recruiting, right, but they are focusing on getting the people with the right skills to work on projects. People are focused on projects and outcomes, and to do that, you don’t recruit based on a job rep. You recruit based on the skills that are required right, to fulfill against a project scope that you have defined, and I think that’s what we’re doing with AI ML and our Skills Cloud.
So people are looking to reskill and upscale their workforce to get a step function change in productivity, and that’s what we’re seeing people really focus on. And we’re at the forefront of that. No one else has a skills platform like that. There’s a reskilling of the workforce taking place, that gives us a lot of optimism about the hiring going forward. That being said, it’s a competitive world as we know them AI ML.
Kash Rangan
The law you saw, is that getting better? Are you seeing any improvement in your customer’s hiring for position?
Carl Eschenbach
You know, we’ll see how it plays out in Q3, because Q1 to Q2 I said we saw a slight slowdown. We’ll see how it plays out here in Q3, and some of the months for most people are always a little bit slower, so. I can’t comment until we get to the end of the quarter what we’re seeing.
Kash Rangan
So I agree with you on reskilling. Gilli [ph] and I are learning Generative AI. We’re learning LLMs and things that we didn’t know how to…
Carl Eschenbach
Co-pilot.
Kash Rangan
Yes, Co-pilot, LLMs and vector databases. I mean, people ask me, so what are you doing in vector databases? I’ll get back to you. And we’d study and be like, this is brand new stuff, right, just mind blowing. So I’m going to do a quick pulse check, and its standing room only here, which is great. Thank you so much. If you have a question, please raise your hand. We’ll get to you. Must be the…
Unidentified Analyst
All the people are warming up. Maybe I’ll ask the question and then we’ll come back to the crowd.
Kash Rangan
Yes, please. Yes, all right Gilli [ph] back to you.
Unidentified Analyst
Yes, I just had one or two if the crowd is quiet. When it comes – you talked a lot about international and then market and the cross selling, up selling opportunity. You also talked about being the digital enterprise backbone, which I think is like a great tagline for that and the motto for what Workday is looking to do. How do you determine and preserve any value of opportunity in front of you and determine which ones to build or buy or even partner as you sometimes do internationally?
Carl Eschenbach
Yes. So we think about if you will, innovation in three different areas. Organic innovation on the technology front, and we’re doing really well there. We continue to bring new solutions, new SKUs, new products to market that run on top of our platform.
We also continue to innovate on the go-to-market side with new channel programs like I said. We see the FINS opportunity. We’re building out there. So we continue to innovate there as well. And then we also listen to our customers and our partners and we seek their advice as to what they would like to see from Workday when it comes to technology. And we would always love to innovate organically ourselves, right. We’d love to build it.
If we can’t, we will think inorganically about how do we go out and find this technology that’s strongly adjacent to our platform that we can acquire, that will allow us to accelerate our growth going forward. So you know, we do all three today.
On the M&A front, specifically what we’re talking about, we look at three different dimensions, whether we would acquire a company. First, culture. I talked about culture. The very first thing I mentioned on stage, I was talking about culture. They have to be a cultural fit.
Number two, they have to have a strong adjacency or a technology fit that we can integrate into our platform, one of our two platforms. And then third, does this snap nicely in our go-to-market and distribution strategy. And if we find those three, right, and there’s customer demand or partners are saying, Workday you should think about this.
We will look at M&A. We’re inquisitive. We’re always looking in to market. We have a strong capital position, but we’re never going to be – I think Aneel and I are so locked in on this together. We’re never going to be the company going out and doing that massive M&A. We’re much more of a technology tuck-in and accelerate their growth through our distribution channel and it’s got it tightly aligned to our culture and the technology integration. So that’s how we think about it.
Unidentified Analyst
Thank you. And I think we have a question right here.
Mike is my colleague who covers European software of all.
Unidentified Analyst
Hi Carl. When you speak to system integrators, they obviously praise the architectural elegance of the Workday suite. You talked about shifting to platforms. But one of the areas that have been cited is the functional capabilities, particularly on the financial side and addressing many international markets. And also from a vertical standpoint, you had the kind of services industry heritage. So where are you in terms of like the capabilities on the manufacturing side and international side, on the core financial safety challenge, SAP or Oracle mode there?
Carl Eschenbach
Yes, it’s a great question and as you know, there are certain industries or verticals that we have not focused on with our financial platform. One of them being if you will, manufacturing.
At this time, we’re focused on the industries where we know we can win and we can actually drive a full platform decision, whether it’s services, whether it’s healthcare, whether it’s state and local government. We’re landing some of those bigger companies right, to run on our financials. We have launched products like accounting center, one of our fastest product right we’ve ever taken to market that Chief Accounting Officers want, to think about how to do accounting.
We have prison analytics that allows you to do more analytics. When we think about it, we think about how do you plan, how do you execute and then how do you analyze across the financials platform. But there are certain verticals like manufacturing, we haven’t leaned into as aggressively, as maybe people would want us to, but we have enough opportunity and others key markets. We don’t want to get distracted.
Kash Rangan
As we wrap-up, I have two quick things I want to ask you. One is, as you’ve talked to CIOs and CEOs, what are your thoughts on where their heads are at the calendar ‘24 budgets and how they are approaching the tech investments and serving it? I would wrap it up, what do you think are the key challenges faced by Workday in the next five, seven years?
A – Carl Eschenbach
Yes. So your first question, we’ve said for the last three quarters, we haven’t really seen any big change in the macro, especially large transformational deals like HCM or financials. Listen, they are getting extra levels of scrutiny. There’s extra levels of approval that’s needed. CFOs are absolutely in a lot more conversations than they were a year ago.
That being said, since the environment has remained quite consistent, we couldn’t be more proud of our teams on the go-to-market side. We have a strong value proposition, a strong total cost of ownership message, and people are absolutely consolidating from best-of-breed to best-of-suite or best-of-platform. So I’m so proud of our teams and how they’ve executed over the last three or four quarters and now we’ve got to keep it going Kash.
As far as our challenges going forward, like I’ll go back to innovation. We need to continue to think about how we innovate. How do we disrupt ourselves leveraging new technologies like AI, Generative AI to bring automation more and more to our customers. How do we continue to foster that notion of a platform?
People talk about the back office. Listen, we’re a front office company. We’re supporting your financials and your people. They face off to your customers. We’re a front office platform that allows people to be very much on their toes and not the heels of their foot, and we’re going to continue to lean into that. But I think innovation is probably the biggest challenge and how do we disrupt ourselves before others do.
And then the last I’d say is making sure we maintain the culture. The culture is special. We need to maintain it from this day forward. Aneel and Dave built a special company. I feel like a huge responsibility to continue to push that forward while still finding growth, but never at the expense of the culture of this company.
And then last, recruit, retain the industry’s best talent, because Kash, there is no substitution for great people.
Kash Rangan
That’s right. Well said. Well said. With that, let’s give a round of applause for the man of the [inaudible], a CEO, former CFO, former COO and a Venture Capitalist, one of a kind. Thank you so much Carl.
Carl Eschenbach
I appreciate it. Thank you, Kash.
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