Item 1. BUSINESS

Overview

Workday is a leading enterprise platform that helps organizations manage their most important assets – their people and money. Workday provides more than 10,000 organizations with AI-powered cloud solutions to help solve some of today’s most complex business challenges, including supporting and empowering their workforce, managing their finances and spend in an ever-changing environment, and planning for the unexpected.

Our purpose is to inspire a brighter work day for all. We strive to make the world of work and business better, and hope to empower customers to do the same through an innovative suite of solutions licensed by more than 65 million users around the world and across industries – from medium-sized businesses to more than 50% of the Fortune 500. Central to our purpose is a set of core values – with our employees as number one – along with customer service, innovation, integrity, fun, and profitability. We believe that having happy employees leads to happy customers, and we are committed to helping our customers adapt and thrive in this increasingly dynamic business environment.

As organizations face changing conditions, we believe the need for an intuitive, scalable, and secure platform that ties finance, people, suppliers, and plans together in one version of truth is more important than ever. Workday’s Artificial Intelligence (“Workday AI”) is built into our platform, allowing us to rapidly deliver and sustain models that can solve countless business problems. As a result, Workday AI helps deliver better employee experiences, increase productivity, improve operational efficiencies, and provide insights for faster, data-driven decision-making. Workday provides organizations with a unified system that can help them plan, execute, analyze, and extend to other applications and environments, thereby helping them continuously adapt how they manage their business and operations. To support this, Workday delivers weekly product updates in addition to major feature releases twice a year. Through this model, Workday customers are able to deliver and adopt innovations quickly and adapt at a time that fits their business needs. We sell our solutions worldwide primarily through direct sales through our field sales teams. We also offer professional services, as do our Workday Services Partners, to help customers deploy our solutions and continually adopt new capabilities.

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In fiscal 2024, we announced the new Workday AI Marketplace to help our customers easily find and deploy certified artificial intelligence (“AI”) and machine learning (“ML”) partner solutions to propel their businesses into the future. In addition, we announced several new generative AI capabilities that are expected to be available to our customers in fiscal 2025, including capabilities that will help customers generate job descriptions in minutes and analyze and correct contracts for more accurate revenue recognition. Workday AI Gateway will enable developers to develop customized applications by providing access to Workday AI and ML services.

Our Capabilities

Workday’s suite of enterprise cloud applications addresses the evolving needs of the C-suite across various industries and are designed to be open, extensible, and configurable, allowing integration with other applications and the ability for users to build their own custom applications. Workday offers applications for Financial Management, Spend Management, Human Capital Management (“HCM”), Planning, and Analytics and Benchmarking.

Financial Management: Solutions for the Office of the Chief Financial Officer (“CFO”)

In the changing world of finance, Workday helps organizations accelerate their journeys towards becoming truly digital finance operations by giving them the tools they need to manage the strategic direction of their organizations while also supporting growth, profitability, and compliance and regulatory requirements. Workday’s suite of financial management applications, built on the Workday platform with Workday AI at the core, helps enable CFOs to maintain accounting information in the general ledger; manage core financial processes such as payables and receivables; identify real-time financial, operational, and management insights; improve financial consolidation; reduce time-to-close; promote internal control and auditability; and achieve consistency across global finance operations.

Spend Management: Solutions for the Office of the CFO

Workday provides procurement professionals with tools to support their businesses through the source-to-contract process, including a user experience designed for ease and collaboration. Workday offers a set of cloud-based spend management solutions that help organizations streamline supplier selection and contracts, manage indirect spend, and build and execute sourcing events, such as requests for proposals. Additionally, Workday offers an expense management solution that provides users with flexible ways to submit and approve expenses, while providing leaders the ability to set controls and analyze spend.

Human Capital Management: Solutions for the Office of the Chief Human Resources Officer (“CHRO”)

In the changing world of human resources (“HR”), Workday helps organizations identify and respond to rapidly changing conditions, whether they stem from shifting talent needs or a focus on belonging and diversity or employee engagement. Workday’s suite of HCM applications allows organizations to manage the entire employee lifecycle – from recruitment to retirement – enabling HR teams to hire, onboard, pay, develop and reskill, and provide meaningful employee experiences that are personalized and helpful, based on listening to the diverse needs of today’s workforce. For example, Workday Skills Cloud, one of our most widely-adopted AI use cases, helps organizations make the important shift to a skills-first approach, helping them prepare today for the jobs of tomorrow.

Planning: Solutions for the Offices of the CFO and CHRO

In today’s dynamic environment, businesses are continuously planning to model various scenarios and preparing to quickly respond to change. Workday provides an active planning process that can model across finance, workforce, sales, and operational data, helping organizations make more informed decisions and respond quickly to changing situations. Workday AI assists in creating forecasts that incorporate historical and third-party data, such as economic data and labor statistics. When combined with Workday’s financial management and HCM solutions, organizations are able to leverage real-time transactional data to dynamically adjust and recalibrate their plans.

Analytics and Benchmarking and Workday Cloud Platform: Solutions for the Offices of the Chief Information Officer (“CIO”), CFO, and CHRO

Workday helps leaders make sense of the vast amount of data they collect enterprise-wide. For example, information technology (“IT”) leaders are navigating the complexities of supporting employees in new environments, which requires them to deploy an adaptable, secure architecture to help ensure global continuity and productivity while remaining agile. Workday provides applications for analytics and reporting, including augmented analytics to surface insights to the line of business in simple-to-understand stories, machine learning to drive efficiency and automation, and benchmarks to compare performance against other organizations.

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Industries: Solutions for the Offices of the CIO, CFO, and CHRO

Workday offers businesses flexible solutions to help them adapt to their industry-specific needs and respond to change. Workday’s applications serve industries such as financial services, healthcare, higher education, state and local government, and professional services. For example, Workday provides supply chain and inventory solutions to healthcare organizations, allowing them to purchase, stock, track, and replenish their inventory to help support patient care. In addition, higher education institutions can deploy Workday’s solutions to manage the end-to-end student and faculty lifecycle. Workday also enables its partner ecosystem to build industry-specific solutions. With Workday Extend, customers and their developers can build custom applications that can accommodate their unique industry business needs, complete with the same experience, security model, and reliability of the native applications offered by Workday.

Product Development

At Workday, innovation is a core value. Our culture encourages out-of-the-box thinking and creativity, which enables us to create applications designed to change the way people work. Our architecture enables us to deploy our solutions rapidly to meet evolving business needs. We invest a significant percentage of our resources in product development and are committed to rapidly building and/or acquiring new applications and solutions. Our product development organization is responsible for product design, development, testing, and certification. We focus our efforts on developing new applications and core technologies, as well as further enhancing the usability, functionality, reliability, security, performance, and flexibility of existing applications. To grow our unified suite of Workday applications, we primarily invest in research and development, but we also selectively acquire companies that are consistent with our design principles, existing product set, corporate strategy, and company culture. We also manage a portfolio of strategic investments through Workday Ventures, our strategic investment arm. We invest primarily in enterprise cloud technology companies that we believe are digitally transforming their industries, improving customer experiences, helping us expand our solution ecosystem or supporting other corporate initiatives. We plan to continue making these types of strategic investments as opportunities arise that we find attractive.

Human Capital

Workday was founded with the idea of putting people at the center of enterprise software, which is why employees are our number one core value. As of January 31, 2024, our global workforce consisted of approximately 18,800 employees in 32 countries, of which approximately 65% were located in the U.S. and 35% were located internationally. We consider our relations with our employees to be very good. Our Chief People Officer, in partnership with our Chief Diversity Officer, is responsible for developing and executing Workday’s human capital strategy, including programs focused on total rewards; belonging and diversity; and employee development, engagement, and wellbeing. Our Chief People Officer and CEO regularly update our Board of Directors and Compensation Committee on human capital matters and seek their input on subjects such as succession planning, executive compensation, and our company-wide equity programs.

Total Rewards

Our compensation philosophy is designed to establish and maintain a fair and flexible compensation program that attracts and rewards talented individuals who possess the skills necessary to support our near-term objectives, create long-term value for our stockholders, grow our business, and assist in the achievement of our strategic goals. We believe that providing employees with competitive pay, ownership in the company, and a wide range of benefits is fundamental to employees feeling valued, motivated, and recognized for their contributions. Equity ownership is a key element of our compensation program, allowing employees to share in Workday’s successes and aligning the interests of our employees with our stockholders. Additionally, our total rewards package includes a cash bonus program, an employee stock purchase plan, healthcare and retirement benefits, paid time off, family leave, and other wellness programs. We also offer specialized benefits such as a holistic global mental and emotional health program, onsite and virtual healthcare resources, a financial wellness program, and support for fertility options and new parents, as well as reimbursement of adoption costs.

Our Commitment to Pay Parity

We believe that all employees deserve to be paid fairly and equitably and be afforded an equal chance to succeed. We have a market-based pay structure that compares our roles to those of our peers in each region. This process helps ensure we pay according to the market value of the jobs we offer. We also have processes in place to make pay decisions based on internally consistent and fair criteria. Each year, we conduct a company-wide pay equity analysis to help ensure pay equity between men and women as well as a US-based analysis with respect to employees of different ethnicities. If we identify differences in pay, we research those differences and, where appropriate, make adjustments to employees’ pay.

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Belonging and Diversity

We strive to be a workplace where all employees are valued for their unique perspectives and where we all collectively contribute to Workday’s success and innovation. Belonging and Diversity (“B&D”) helps us cultivate an equitable and inclusive environment for all. Whether it’s through creating resources and initiatives that enable and strengthen our culture, building inclusive products and technology, or hiring and developing diverse talent, our vision is to Value Inclusion, Belonging, and Equity (“VIBE”) for all. Our 12 Employee Belonging Councils (“EBCs”) play an integral role in fostering a culture of VIBE. Our EBCs, including Black @ Workday, Military and Veterans, and Workday for People with Disabilities, among others, provide a designated space for members and allies to advance inclusive business initiatives, enable professional development, promote connections, and bring greater visibility to diverse talent, as well as engage in community outreach activities.

As a part of our ongoing commitment to VIBE, we track progress and plan for the future by using our internally developed B&D products and solutions to assess equity and analyze diversity- and inclusion-related data that informs our VIBE strategy. Through these products, we can assess, measure, benchmark, and manage diversity and inclusion as well as empower our leaders to create B&D plans and measure performance and outcomes across areas such as hiring, development, and employee experience. Looking at our diversity data, we continue to make strides in our representation. As of January 31, 2024, women represented 42% of our global employees and 38% of our leadership positions globally, and underrepresented minorities (defined as those who identify as Alaskan native, American Indian, Black, Latinx, Native Hawaiian, Other Pacific Islander, and/or two or more races) represented 14% of our U.S. employees and 10% of our leadership positions in the U.S. We remain focused on increasing gender equity and representation globally, and continuing efforts to support our underrepresented communities.

We believe that talent is everywhere, but opportunity is not. Skills, education, and experience are gained in a variety of ways that are often not recognized in the traditional recruiting process. Talent acquisition at Workday ensures there is intentionality about weaving VIBE throughout our hiring practices to ensure an inclusive and equitable experience for all. We also invest in leading workforce development organizations who provide direct training and employment opportunities for candidates facing barriers to employment through our Opportunity Onramps programs.

Learning and Development

Our employees tell us they are most engaged when they are continuously being exposed to new things, empowered to build new skills, and able to make an impact. Our employees have instant access to training via several industry-leading learning platforms, which provide our global workforce with convenient, timely access to content from subject matter experts. We offer a number of educational resources, development opportunities, and a support community to guide employees throughout their Workday careers. For example, we developed Career Hub which helps our employees share skills and interests and receive relevant connections, curated learning content, and recommended jobs to help them on their career journeys. Using Workday AI, Career Hub provides workers with suggestions to grow their skills and capabilities and encourages them to build a plan as they explore opportunities for continued career development.

Additionally, to foster a strong culture of compliance and ethics, we conduct annual compliance and ethics training of our Code of Conduct for all employees. In fiscal 2024, we had a 100% completion rate for our annual Code of Conduct training.

Communication and Engagement

Our culture and how we treat people are paramount at Workday, and we believe that being transparent and facilitating information sharing are key to our success. Workday leverages multiple communication channels to engage and inform employees, including company meetings, town halls, internal websites, and social collaboration tools. We also use Workday Peakon Employee Voice to collect feedback in real time from our employees and turn that feedback into dialog and action. Since we introduced Workday Peakon Employee Voice in fiscal 2022, employees have provided over 486,000 confidential comments on the platform through weekly surveys and 95% of our employees have taken part in at least one survey, which reflects strong engagement by our employees. We receive data points from these surveys that help us identify actions to take to improve our company and our culture.

Buoyed by the opportunities offered by our own technology, our talent philosophy puts employees at the center of their own career and performance journey by providing them the tools and framework to further their careers. We have done this by establishing a clear philosophy and set of expectations. Every Workmate receives enablement on our performance and growth philosophy, what’s expected of them, and how to leverage these practices to ensure their own personal success and career growth at Workday. Our talent and performance dashboard provides a snapshot view of performance-related tasks, with a visual summary of goals, feedback, and growth opportunities. Employees can take action to update their contributions, capabilities, career, and connections using the quick links provided in the dashboard.

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Health, Safety, and Wellbeing

At Workday, we take a holistic approach to our employees’ health and wellbeing and have created programs that focus on four core dimensions: Physical; Mental and Emotional; Financial; and Social and Flex. These programs go beyond traditional medical benefits and wellness offerings and allow employees to focus on their personal wellness goals as well as their mental health.

Our hybrid work model provides flexibility for our employees to work from home, while still bringing people together to foster collaboration and innovation. We offer new remote-based employees a stipend to enable them to have a comfortable work-from-home environment. To help keep health and mental wellness top of mind, we offer a series of programs and communications focused on mental health. These included tools and resources related to sleep, healthy eating, and mindfulness, as well as enhancements to our Employee Assistance Program to, among other things, facilitate timely access to culturally responsive mental health support for employees and their family members.

Our Global Workplace Safety team supports the traditional corporate areas of employee health and safety and physical security for Workday on a global scale. From the workplace to work-related travel, we strive to keep our employees safe with programs including safety awareness training, emergency response protocols, and our ergonomics and life safety team programs.

Giving and Doing

In support of our efforts to give back to the communities where we live and work and to further our culture, our employees donate time and expertise as mentors and volunteers to help close the skills gap. On top of our strategic, company-led social impact and employee volunteerism efforts, we also believe that giving back is even more rewarding when people get to make an impact through their favorite causes. We encourage and support employee giving and volunteering through programs such as our charitable donation matching gift program, our paid time off benefit for employees to volunteer and give back to their communities, and our team volunteer experience, where employee teams of five or more can volunteer with a charity partner of their choice and receive grants of up to $5,000.

Customers

We primarily sell to medium-sized and large, global organizations that span numerous industry categories, including professional and business services, financial services, healthcare, education, government, technology, media, retail, and hospitality.

We have built a company culture centered around customer success and satisfaction. As part of their subscription, customers are provided support services and tools to enhance their experience with Workday applications. This includes 24/7 support; training; a Customer Success Management group to assist customers in production; and Workday Community, an online portal where customers can collaborate and share knowledge and best practices. Additionally, we offer extensive customer training opportunities and a professional services ecosystem of experienced Workday consultants and system integrators to help customers achieve a timely adoption of Workday and enable them to enhance the value of our applications over the life of their subscription.

Sales and Marketing

We sell our subscription contracts and related services globally, primarily through our direct sales organization, which consists of field sales and field sales support personnel. The Workday Field Sales team is aligned by geography, industry, and/or customer size. We also segment our sales teams into two distinct groups: those focused on landing new customer relationships, and those focused on expanding our relationship within our existing customers. We generate customer leads, accelerate sales opportunities, and build brand awareness through our marketing programs and strategic relationships. Our marketing programs largely target senior business leaders, including CFOs, CHROs, and CIOs.

Our sales strategy is focused on both adding new customers and on growing our relationships with our existing customers to expand the adoption of our suite of solutions over time. As our customers realize the benefits of our entire suite of service offerings, we aim to upgrade the customers’ experience with new products and features, and gain additional subscriptions by targeting new functional areas and business units. Additionally, by extending our go-to-market capabilities globally, we aim to grow our business by selling to new customers in new regions.

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Partner Ecosystem

As a core part of our strategy, we have developed and continue to grow a global ecosystem of partners to both broaden and complement our application offerings and to provide services designed to meet the complex needs of our customers both large and small. These relationships include independent software vendors, technology partners, and system integrators, who help deliver technology solutions and expertise to support our joint customers, as well as less traditional partners such as benefits brokers, who help introduce our solutions to their customers. Our growing ecosystem of partners helps accelerate our customers’ digital transformation initiatives. The Workday Marketplace allows customers to find solutions built on Workday’s platform that meet their specific needs, including trusted solutions from Workday-certified partners. We have also expanded existing relationships with Automatic Data Processing, Inc. (“ADP”) and Alight to enable a more streamlined experience for payroll administrators and with Amazon Web Services, Inc. (“AWS”) and Google Cloud to accelerate innovation and time to value for our customers. Our Industry Accelerator program combines Workday partners, solutions, and services to help speed cloud transformation efforts for banking, healthcare, insurance, and technology companies.

Seasonality

We have experienced seasonality in terms of when we enter into customer agreements for our services. Historically, we have signed a significantly higher percentage of agreements with new customers, as well as renewal agreements with existing customers, in the fourth quarter of each fiscal year due to customer buying patterns. Although these seasonal factors are common in the technology industry, historical patterns should not be considered a reliable indicator of our future sales activity or performance.

Competition

The overall market for enterprise application software is rapidly evolving, highly competitive, and subject to changing technology, shifting customer needs, and frequent introductions of new products. We currently compete with large, well-established, enterprise software vendors, such as Oracle Corporation (“Oracle”) and SAP SE (“SAP”). We also face competition from other enterprise software vendors, from regional competitors that only operate in certain geographic markets, and from vendors of specific applications that address only one or a portion of our applications, some of which offer cloud-based solutions. These vendors include Anaplan, Inc.; ADP; Coupa Software Inc.; Dayforce, Inc.; Infor, Inc.; Microsoft Corporation; and UKG Inc.

In addition, other cloud companies that provide services in different markets may develop applications or acquire companies that operate in our target markets, and some potential customers may elect to develop their own internal applications. However, the domain and industry expertise that is required for a successful solution in the areas of financial management, HCM, and analytics may inhibit new entrants that are unable to invest the necessary capital to accurately address global requirements and regulations. We expect continued consolidation in our industry that could lead to significantly increased competition.

We believe the principal competitive factors in our markets include:

• level of customer satisfaction and quality of customer references;

• speed to deploy and ease of use;

• breadth and depth of application functionality;

• total cost of ownership and flexibility of payment terms;

• brand awareness and reputation;

• adaptive technology platform;

• capability for configuration, integration, security, scalability, and reliability of applications;

• operational excellence to ensure system availability, scalability, and performance;

• ability to innovate and rapidly respond to customer needs;

• domain and industry expertise in applicable laws and regulations;

• size of customer base and level of user adoption;

• customer confidence in financial stability and future viability; and

• ability to integrate with legacy enterprise infrastructure and third-party applications.

We believe that we compete favorably based on these factors. Our ability to remain competitive will largely depend on our ongoing performance in product development and customer support.

For more information regarding the competitive risks we face, see “Risk Factors” included in Part I, Item 1A of this report.

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Intellectual Property

We rely on a combination of trade secrets, patents, copyrights, and trademarks, as well as contractual protections, to establish and protect our intellectual property rights. We require our employees, contractors, consultants, suppliers, and other third parties to enter into confidentiality and proprietary rights agreements, and we control access to software, documentation, and other proprietary information. Although we rely on intellectual property rights, including trade secrets, patents, copyrights, and trademarks, as well as contractual protections and controls to establish and protect our proprietary rights, we believe that factors such as the technological and creative skills of our personnel; creation of new products, features, and functionality; and frequent enhancements to our applications are more essential to establishing and maintaining our technology leadership position.

Governmental Regulation

As a public company with global operations, we are subject to various federal, state, local, and foreign laws and regulations. These laws and regulations, which may differ among jurisdictions, include, among others, those related to financial and other disclosures, accounting standards, privacy and data protection, intellectual property, AI ethics and machine learning, corporate governance, tax, government contracting, trade, antitrust, employment, immigration and travel, import/export, and anti-corruption. The costs to comply with these governmental regulations are not material to the understanding of our business. For a further discussion of the risks associated with government regulations that may materially impact us, see “Risk Factors” included in Part I, Item 1A of this report.

Available Information

Our Annual Report on Form 10-K, Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q, Current Reports on Form 8-K, and other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”), and all amendments to these filings, can be obtained free of charge from our website at www.workday.com/sec-filings. The SEC maintains an Internet site that contains reports, proxy and information statements, and other information regarding issuers that file electronically with the SEC at www.sec.gov. Workday also uses its blogs.workday.com website as a means of disclosing material non-public information and for complying with its disclosure obligations under Regulation FD. Information contained on or accessible through any website reference herein is not part of, or incorporated by reference in, this Form 10-K, and the inclusion of such website addresses is as inactive textual references only. Workday, the Workday logo, VIBE, Peakon, Zimit, VNDLY, and Opportunity Onramps are trademarks of Workday, Inc., which may be registered in the United States and elsewhere. Other trademarks, service marks, or trade names appearing in this report are the property of their respective owners.

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