Declaring that āfinance transformation is upon us,ā Workday co-CEO Aneel Bhusri said CFOs who have had to battle through the pandemic with inflexible on-premises systems are on the verge of making full-scale commitments to the cloud.
(On my weekly Cloud Wars Top 10 rankings, Workday is #8.)
During Workdayās FY21 Q4 earnings call last week, Bhusri was asked to describe the current market demand for his companyās two primary product lines: HR applications and Finance applications.
The typically low-key co-founder and co-CEO enthusiastically said that now that the worst of the pandemicās disruption is behind us, CFOs are finally readyāafter years of reluctance and hesitancyāto jump into the cloud.
āPre-pandemic, the HR world was already full into the cloud-first mode and almost every function in HR was moving to the cloud as clear as they could,ā Bhusri said.
āFinance was not at that same place. And so during the pandemic, as we saw a few companies moving to finance to the cloud, we saw others saying, āHey, letās just wait until we get out of the pandemic and then we can move forward.ā
āHereās the most optimistic thing that I learned over the last 12 months around Financials: all the customers that were using legacy finance systems were challenged to run their business and said, āWe need to move to a modern finance system.ā ā
A moment later, Bhusri added, āWe actually saw that companies that were struggling with their legacy finance systems during the pandemic have actually accelerated their requirements to go to a cloud-based solution.
āAnd because itās currently a very lowly penetrated market, we have a lot of upside,ā Bhusri said.
Poking fun at himself, Bhusri added this perspective: āI know Iāve been the āPied Piperā on this, and that Iāve been talking about Finance for probably a decade at this point.
āBut I really think that finance transformation is upon us.ā
Choosing not to rely solely on his piper music to convince CFOs to make the leap, Bhusri twice cited market assessments from research firm Gartner to buttress his optimism.
Gartner told Workday that āCore Accounting or Core Finance inquiries were down 14%,ā Bhusri said, meaning customersā focus was elsewhere.
āBut Core Planning inquiries were up I think close to 30%. And as the pandemic eases, what they also said was that many of the core accounting projects that had been delayedāthe ones that were pushed out to 2023 and 2024 and 2025āwere getting sucked forward because people realized that they needed to start on that digital-transformation journey for financials.
āSo while itās been a tough time for financials during the pandemic, I actually think from here on out itās going to get accelerated.ā
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