Page 48 - Fortune-November 01, 2018

and cofounder David Duffield once led THE FUTURE 50 counting departments, and in its short life,
an all-hands meeting in cow and monkey it has earned a reputation for ease of use
onesies in honor of Irish retailer Primark, a and reliability that has kept clients loyal.
newly signed Workday customer that sells For Bhusri and Duffield, the company’s
the garments. “Happy employees make for chairman, Workday is a second act. The
happy customers,” Bhusri says. two also worked together at PeopleSoft,
If Workday can give itself over to a little 23% which made similar products an enterprise-
frivolity, that’s because its products are technology generation ago before being
serious stuff. Just 13 years old, Workday bought by Oracle in a bitterly contested
makes software that runs critical opera- $10.3 billion takeover. Today Workday is a
tions for half of the Fortune 50 and more Year-to-date leader in “cloud” software, programs sold
than 35% of the Fortune 500. It specializes gain for as subscriptions and managed remotely.
in systems for human resources and ac- The company built its wares specifically for
Workday’s stock
(through Oct.15). online distribution. It prides itself on out-
spending competitors on R&D, on having
The S&P 500 happy customers, and on rapid expansion. It
rose about 3% isn’t profitable, but it produces half-a-billion
over the same dollars in annual cash flow and is growing
stretch like a startup. Wall Street expects revenue
in the current fiscal year of $2.8 billion, a
nearly 30% year-over-year growth rate.
This combination of hard and soft
metrics—financial growth, heavy product
MORE THAN investment, and a future-oriented (even
35% fun-having) workforce—has landed Work-
day atop this year’s Fortune Future 50, a
quantitative analysis of large publicly traded
companies assessed by management con-
Share of the sultancy BCG to have their best years ahead
Fortune 500 of them.
that runs PETROS DERMETZIS, Workday’s chief product
Workday officer, has a PopSockets grip on his phone
software with an illustration of Theódoros Kolo-
kotrónis, a famously helmeted Greek gen-
eral who defeated the Ottoman army to win
Greece’s independence in the 19th century.
“I try to copy him,” says Dermetzis, who was
raised in Greece by a Greek father and an
30% English mother, married a Spaniard, and
has worked in locales as diverse as Japan,
Spain, and Atlanta. He’s been associated
with Duffield and Bhusri for 23 years, since
Year-over-year before PeopleSoft bought his startup.
growth in Like other software companies, Workday
subscription touts itself as a one-stop shop for corpo-
revenue, rate users. Its first product was for HR
departments. Where Workday separates
through the itself from the pack is in its weekly online
most recent updates, twice-yearly major product re-dos
quarter (both unusually frequent for enterprise
software), and near-zero downtime. Der-
metzis calls this ability to serve customers
“unheard-of” and boasts that “Salesforce

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