Workday, Inc. (WDAY) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

June 2, 2020

NASDAQ US Information Technology Software conference_presentation 36 min

Earnings Call Speaker Segments

Kash Rangan

analyst
#1

All right. I suppose we're live, operator. I'll take that as a yes, if you can hear me okay. Can Aneel and Justin hear me okay on the other side of this webcast?

Aneel Bhusri

executive
#2

Yes.

Kash Rangan

analyst
#3

Perfect. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. This looks like it's going to work just as well. Our next guest needs no introduction, but I'm just going to introduce him anyway, Aneel Bhusri, Chairman, CEO, Co-Founder of Workday. It's been a real honor to have Aneel as a repeat keynote speaker at our conference for a number of years now. And we've been pleasantly surprised at the evolution of Workday in a nice way, and all the things we've learned along the way during Aneel's keynote presentations have been extremely insightful, one of the key highlights of our tech conference, I would say. So Aneel and Justin, thank you so much for joining us. I hope that you're able to see me clearly on the video.

Aneel Bhusri

executive
#4

Yes. And for once, you're not wearing a hoodie.

Kash Rangan

analyst
#5

Yes. I was debating that. I -- this is still a hybrid. I've got a little cloud in me and then an on-prem, covering the cloud. I appreciate you guys taking the time again. Thanks to all the clients for dialing in as well here.

Kash Rangan

analyst
#6

Aneel, let's talk about the COVID impact since that's the most topical thing right now, then we can get into the strategy of the company. How has the company adapted its digital transformation message in light of this unique circumstance we're going through? Certainly not been in this kind of a recession -- no 2 recessions are the same, but this recession is a very different one. How is the company positioning itself through a marketplace that's consumed with concern for COVID?

Aneel Bhusri

executive
#7

Yes. And today, a lot of other things as well. So first and foremost, thank you for having me, Kash. And I hope everybody out there is safe and healthy. Between the pandemic and the protests -- the rightful protest. It's a crazy world out there right now. We went through a similar crisis in '08, '09. Different in many ways, but it was still an economic crisis and that's when it impacts our customers. And what we talk to our prospects and customers about, and now we have a lot of showcases, of course, with our customers, is quick time to value, agility of the cloud, not having to have your people on-site to run these applications, being able to change business processes on the fly. And we've had customers who've used Workday as the backbone for a lot of the COVID work. One large manufacturer uses it to track COVID cases around the globe and move shifts accordingly. Another one has used it to do hazard pay, 1 million paychecks, which is about as high as you get for paychecks for one company in a week. And then recently, we announced the partnership with Salesforce. So we're just trying to give our customers the tools and flexibility. And I think the folks that are in the cloud, whether it's with us or Salesforce, they really recognize the benefit of not having to run their on-premise operations. So it's not necessarily that we have to position any differently. We just have to showcase what our customers are able to do in the cloud that you couldn't do on-premise. And on the finance side, we have customers, including us, but companies like Aon, closing their book with nobody in the office. That's just not possible with the legacy systems. And so it's -- what I tell our team, and I'm very proud of our team, it's our time to shine, and we have to show our customers that we can deliver great service during this challenging time, and prospects continue to be interested and moving forward with us.

Kash Rangan

analyst
#8

That's great to hear. One of the things we hear from successful software companies, such as yourselves, is the art of virtual selling. I'm curious if, again, just expand upon how the company has successfully implemented virtual selling. Where does it work? Where it doesn't work? Because your quarter was significantly better than people's expectations.

Aneel Bhusri

executive
#9

Well, I think a lot of our demonstration work had been done virtually anyways. And that's been for a long time. We've been using Zoom. We were a heavy Zoom user even before COVID-19, and WebEx, actually GoToMeeting. We use all the different services to reach our customers, depending on what they feel comfortable using. And so from the sales and presales perspective, that had been our way of doing business anyways. That last component of being on-site, closing the deal face to face, that is definitely different. And that is definitely the challenging piece of it. I'm doing a lot of Zoom calls to do the same thing with customers and prospects, as I did before, just not in person. And it's just not a great -- people talk about working from home forever. I just don't think that's realistic. Too many good things happen from people being together, and collaborating and making those decisions and looking at each other in the eye, and really can't do that on technology. So that last part of the close has been probably the most challenging piece. We've been very effective doing all the delivery side in terms of implementations remotely. And again, we have done a lot of that work remotely anyways to reduce the travel costs for -- T&E costs for our customers. So we were able to step into that pretty quickly.

Kash Rangan

analyst
#10

Got it. Got it. Got it.

Aneel Bhusri

executive
#11

Justin, you can correct me, but I think we had 90 go-lives in Q1. So despite the pandemic, work went forward and customers went live.

Justin Furby

executive
#12

Yes. 90 just in March and April, yes.

Kash Rangan

analyst
#13

Ladies and gentlemen, that's Justin Furby. There you go. You got the first shot here.

Justin Furby

executive
#14

There we go.

Kash Rangan

analyst
#15

Great attire. So Aneel, can you talk a little bit about the front end of the dimension pipeline? Are leads still coming in as they would in a normal economy? Or are people a little hesitant? Talk to us about the front end of how things are shaping up for your pipeline.

Aneel Bhusri

executive
#16

No. Leads are still coming in. Leads are still coming in at a healthy clip. When will customers be willing to close on new opportunities? That's harder to predict, but leads are definitely coming in. And I think it's because those who are still on-premise are really struggling. And they talk to their peers who are in the cloud who have all this agility, the ability to not have people in the office to be able to change business processes on the fly. I mean, Workday was built for remote work. We have a really powerful iPad and phone clients. And so for those that are not working with us in the cloud, I think it's actually been, hey, let's find out why these other folks have gone with Workday in the cloud. And then we've had some CEO councils and on these CEO councils that I'm part of, they have proactively called out how helpful Workday has been during this pandemic. So leads are coming in. And then we have a couple of applications in the case of Scout RFP and Planning that are very timely today. As I mentioned on the earnings call, the number of plans that people are running is up 30x since the pandemic happened. Not surprisingly, people are rerunning their financial plans, they're rerunning their workforce plans. And every week, the world looks different. So there's been definitely a spike in interest in Planning, especially cloud planning because you just can't be that flexible with the old line planning systems. And the same with Scout RFP, they had a very good first quarter. We'll see what happens going forward. But it's -- in the case of both Scout and Adaptive, they're quick go-lives. You can be live on those applications in 1 month to 6 weeks. And then Scout, it lets you -- from a source-to-pay, it lets you get a global view of all of your procurement providers and figure out how to quickly prioritize in case of shutdown, what you're purchasing, which is really important in a time like this. So those are different than HR and finance, which are 6- to 9-month kind of implementations on a rapid implementation path. These are 1- to 2-month cycles, and they are generating a lot of interest right now.

Kash Rangan

analyst
#17

Got it. I was sort of trying to ask you more about Scout. Since you talked about Scout, maybe it's pertinent to drill into that a little bit. What are the surprises you've uncovered after the Scout RFP acquisition, granted it had a really good quarter? What are the things that you've uncovered that make your conviction perhaps even greater than it was at the time of the acquisition? Or maybe it's not the same at all in which...

Aneel Bhusri

executive
#18

No. I'd say the 2 founders, Alex and Stan, are really, really exceptional. And I knew them just in passing. We'd had a few meetings together, a glass of wine together. But now that I've gotten a chance to work with them, they're exceptional. Their team is exceptional. And they have that same orientation that Workday does about really delivering value for their customers, and I love the fact that they were able to deliver value so quickly. And I got to say their UI is what I would consider like absolute state-of-the-art. And there are things that we can learn from their UI and bring it back to the rest of our applications.

Kash Rangan

analyst
#19

Aneel, why is there so much excitement about Procurement because it's been around for 20 years since the advent of Ariba, Concur and JD. What's going on in that market the? If you just take a step back, what caused you to invest in that market through the acquisition?

Aneel Bhusri

executive
#20

Yes. Well, historically, Procurement was an extension of Financials, and the Procurement folks did not have a seat at the table to make the -- the right -- or the decisions that were right for their organizations. And what's happened over the last couple of decades, especially the last 10 years with the global supply chain, these Chief Procurement Officers, they're controlling a massive amount of spend, both supply chain spend and internal spend. And Procurement now is effectively its own system of record. I think companies like Coupa are proving it out. I think Coupa's doing a really nice job of doing that. And we looked at it and said, "Hey, longer term, maybe we can be a stand-alone procurement vendor." But in the short term, having a strong procurement solution makes our financial solution that much better, totally seamlessly unified with Scout all the way from source-to-pay to procure-to-pay -- sorry, source-to-pay and then procure-to-pay. That value proposition, coupled with world-class financials, is what the CFOs are looking for today. The less integration points, the less touch points they need to have, the better. But I also think it's just a reflection of the fact that Procurement has earned its right at the table to be its own true system of record like HR and finance and CRM.

Kash Rangan

analyst
#21

Not to ignore HCM, we're going to get into HCM, but I'm hearing a lot of Procurement, Planning and Financial. Those 3 applications tend to go with each other in this economy that we're going through.

Aneel Bhusri

executive
#22

Absolutely.

Kash Rangan

analyst
#23

Can you maybe talk about how there could be a bull case for Financials accelerating, as far as the cloud transition is concerned, because you've got 2 other critical pieces of functionality that go with Financials, Planning and Procurement. Did that accelerate the move to Financials?

Aneel Bhusri

executive
#24

I do think that post pandemic when people settle down, there will be an acceleration to the cloud for Financials. And I hope that Workday is one of the big beneficiaries of that. And to your point, when I go back 4 or 5 years, we would go in and talk to a customer, if they didn't want to replace their core accounting system, well, that was the end of the conversation. Today, we can say, "Well, if you're not ready to replace your core accounting systems, do you want to start with financial planning? Do you want to start with Scout RFP?" And we have some other offerings in the works that will be another way to start and come back to core, accounting later. And so we used to be kind of a one-story sales pitch. And now we can say, hey, we're building the suite out for the office of the CFO, starting with FP&A, going to accounting. Now we've got Procurement. And then, of course, we got the Prism Analytics on the back end. And so it's a multi-pronged strategy that gives the CFOs comfort that we're just not a -- we're not just a point solution for core accounting but that we have the full breadth to cover all of their needs. At the same point, I think this pandemic has shown customers that if you're in the cloud, whether it's Workday or Salesforce or Microsoft or AWS or ServiceNow, you just have a lot of benefits in terms of agility. And if you're not working with those kind of vendors, it's a real struggle. I think Kash just froze on us. Justin, move your head, so I know that you didn't freeze.

Justin Furby

executive
#25

Yes. No, I'm here. I'll pick up...

Kash Rangan

analyst
#26

I'm here as well. Somebody must have gone crazy on Netflix, although I imposed an arbitrary rule in my house so that no Netflix for the next 1 hour or so. Great. Was it -- did I miss 15 seconds or 10 seconds? If I missed it, that's okay. Everybody else heard you.

Aneel Bhusri

executive
#27

I think everybody else heard it. I do think that post pandemic, finance is one of the last cross-industry areas to go to the cloud, not necessarily in SMB and medium enterprise, it's been in the cloud for some time. The last area has been large enterprise, and now we're seeing it happen. We saw it with Fannie Mae. We have a number of Fortune 500 accounts in the pipeline going forward. So that transition is happening. And I would just say, we've also routed out the sets of -- a big deliverable for us is Accounting Center, which is basically a way to capture and analyze all the detailed financial information and run the reports analysis you want against it. And for the financial services industry, for insurance company, that was just a critical offering. And we're now about to go in production with our first few customers, and it's been key to our sales push into financial services.

Kash Rangan

analyst
#28

Got it. Got it. Got it. And one point, Aneel, since you mentioned financial services, how close are we to a bank like a Bank of America switching to something like Workday Financials in the cloud?

Aneel Bhusri

executive
#29

I hope not that far away. I mean you might have some influence on that, Kash. Bank of America is a great HR customer, and I know your management team. And I think at the right time -- the legacy systems are just not moving forward. They're unchanged over the last 5 or 6 years. And so if you want innovation, if you want to be current with what's new in the world of accounting and finance, the only place to get it, whether it's from us or actually one of the legacy folks, is through the cloud offerings. And if a company makes that decision, I'm happy to go toe to toe with any of the competitors cloud to cloud.

Kash Rangan

analyst
#30

What is the single largest Workday Financials deployment at scale that you're the most proud of that could be lighthouse account, a showcase in the event, a matter of fact, or whatever?

Aneel Bhusri

executive
#31

I think we've got quite a few. I would say the one that's been the longest, and they started with us early on and they've now turned into a huge company, is Netflix, they run all of our finance products. Everything we've pretty much built. Aon has been a great finance customer over the last several years, and they've really helped us build out the system for financial services. J.B. Hunt has been live for a while, huge transaction volumes. And now Fannie Mae is a Fortune 50 financial services company. And so in terms of feature functions, we have the necessary feature functions. The key now is to show the world that the system can scale to meet the needs of the largest companies. And over the last 4 years, we've gone from Fortune 500 to Fortune 200 to, with Fannie Mae, a Fortune 50 account running -- we have to take them live, but we're very comfortable that we will be able to with their volumes. And so much like HR, it's that progression on scalability that allows us now to have almost half of the Fortune 500 running Workday, and importantly, 50 of the Fortune 100. So we got to that point in half of the Fortune 50, we got to that point where we could prove out scalability, and then they came to Workday, I don't want to say en masse, but they came in large numbers.

Kash Rangan

analyst
#32

Got it. You talked to us, Aneel, about the Fannie Mae deal. That certainly is the biggest Financials win in that segment of the market that I have heard about. What were the dynamics like? How tough was it to -- was it for the customer to make that switch? And how tough was it to replace the incumbent? Because you don't fix something that's working unless it's really broken. What were the drivers of that decision to go with it?

Aneel Bhusri

executive
#33

Well, I don't want to put words in their mouth. But I would just say that much like many other customers, they're thinking about the transition to the cloud and digital transformation. When they explored their options. I think it came down to 2 of us. I won't mention the other one. And a key part of the sale was the Accounting Center component. They felt comfortable with that. And also, they felt comfortable that we were going to be a great long-term partner. We were going to take care of them and make them successful. And I think in this environment, that focus on being a long-term partner, you learn everything about your partners during these difficult times. And I hope everyone would say, "Hey, Workday has really stepped up to be a great partner." And word gets around.

Kash Rangan

analyst
#34

Got it. Got it. Got it. I know that we had a slew of AI enhancements to the product, which -- I mean at least the demo that I saw at Rising just blew my mind. And you'd said that around April time frame, you'd have this functionality and general availability. Can you just talk to us about the adoption of these technologies? What are customers saying about it? I know that you're not going to charge more for these modules, but if it could help with retention, upsell. Where is Workday going with AI more broadly speaking?

Aneel Bhusri

executive
#35

Well, I actually think -- I'm less worried about retention. I think actually where it really helps is on new deals. Do you want an AI-enhanced smart system? Or do you just want a legacy system that doesn't leverage your data? So it's now live across many areas in the applications. It's now become, I'd say, just part of the fabric of Workday, whether it's looking at expenses, succession planning, whatever the area is. And it gets better and better as customers collect more data. There's really no way to make those systems better without data, and we have access to lots of data. And as the customers use it more and more, they're getting better and better at predictions about where their business is going. So super happy where we are. I give our Head of Engineering on the technology side, Sayan Chakraborty, a huge amount of credit for driving, not just a machine learning strategy, but driving it into the core so that it can be used by all applications. That's just a feature here or there just for recruiting or just for expenses or general ledger, but actually, it's now foundational to our technology.

Kash Rangan

analyst
#36

Got it. On HCM, I know that it's been a fascinating conversation that you and I have had about -- how big is the addressable market? And how big is the replacement market for legacy cloud or legacy SaaS solutions? Forget the legacy on-prem. Can you just talk about how much more tail is there to this market?

Aneel Bhusri

executive
#37

Well, I don't really know how to address the second part. It sort of accounts on other companies failing, and it's hard for me to predict that. I wouldn't mind it happening, but it's hard to predict that. On the front end, there's still a ton of HCM opportunity, maybe less so in the U.S., which is the first market really to move, especially in the Fortune 500. When we look at medium enterprise across the globe, when you look at actually a lot of the Fortune 500-scale companies outside the U.S., they still are on-premise. And I'll take a market like Japan, where we have a lot of the multinationals there, a lot of the big names there, they're live on Workday in every place but Japan because Japan has been less willing before recent times to move to the cloud. So you go through that geography by geography, and there's a lot of opportunity, in particular, outside the U.S. And also when we have this installed base, I wouldn't lose sight of the fact that our customers are happy. They've always been over 95% in terms of customer satisfaction rates. And we are not ready to announce them on this session with you today, but we're almost planning new modules that we can sell back into the installed base.

Kash Rangan

analyst
#38

So you're planning on new modules. So the R&D is busy at work trying to -- and that is a perfect segue into the net new ACV growth of 50% in the back-to-the-base business. This is an initiative that you had embarked upon fairly recently. Can you talk to us more about how sustainable is this path going forward? That's very impressive, because the installed base is a massive installed base today.

Aneel Bhusri

executive
#39

Yes. I think it's very sustainable. I don't know what's sustainable during this current pandemic. Nobody knows. I am optimistic that if things are on the same trajectory that in Q4, we might be back to some sense of normalcy in our business, but who knows. You know as well as I do. We have been, for a number of years, just focused on getting new accounts and getting them live and in production. And to your point, now we have over 3,000 HR accounts, 900 finance accounts. Many of those are live. We typically have about 60%, 70% live of our accounts at any time as we keep adding new accounts. So they're a great opportunity to go back. And up until the last 1.5 years, we really didn't have a real serious motion of going back to the base. And I give -- again, our Co-President, Chano Fernandez, all the credit. He's moved quite a bit of talent, not just created a motion, but quite a bit of talent into that area. And all things being equal, if a customer can get a capability from us that's relatively similar to our best-of-breed solution but a point solution, I think they prefer to get it from Workday, and that's what the data shows. So I think you'll see that back-to-the-base trend continue for the foreseeable future.

Kash Rangan

analyst
#40

Got it. Got it. Got it. I know that at some points in the past, we've talked about -- you had a $5 billion goal, and that's completely within striking distance now, but perhaps a $10 billion goal. I think ServiceNow has talked about a $10 billion goal. And what are your thoughts on the viability of a $10 billion revenue goal? And what are the other pillars you might need? Or maybe you just need to strengthen your current pillars to get to the $10 billion?

Aneel Bhusri

executive
#41

So when you get to $10 billion and you look at the numbers, it puts you into the 10 to 15 largest software -- independent software companies in the world. And I think that sort of gives you the right to be independent for as long as you want to be independent, and that's what we're striving for. And I think it's absolutely doable. I think we're in the markets that support that kind of opportunity, whether it's financials or as we've expanded into procurement or planning. Well, planning is a huge opportunity, and it's not just financial planning. It's workforce planning over time. It can be operational planning. On the Prism Analytics side, right now, it includes people analytics, but you could expect that we'll do dedicated analytics for finance and supply chain as well. So I think our current offerings have the potential to get us through that $10 billion number. One thing we have to think about is, can we break off some of these offerings like a Prism Analytics in a couple of years so it's sold stand-alone? If they're not a Workday customer, can we still sell Prism Analytics in the same way that we sell Planning and Scout? If they're not a Workday customer for HR, finance, they can still buy a Planning or Scout? Right now, they can't for Prism. And that applies to other areas as well. That's part of the math around getting there, too. And I wouldn't rule out acquisitions. We're not a fan of big acquisitions, but Adaptive has been fantastic. Scout has that same opportunity. Both complementary. They both allow us to stay true to our architecture. And if there are more kinds of opportunities like that, we take advantage of it. Although that's not necessarily our DNA to do a lot of those, but the 2 we've done have been really successful so far.

Kash Rangan

analyst
#42

Fantastic. With respect to Planning, a question that I've gotten from a few investors after your call, is Workday taking share from Anaplan? Because you're starting to get a phenomenal planning cooperative, it just begs the question.

Aneel Bhusri

executive
#43

I'm always careful to talk about whether we're taking share from somebody else. I think the market is so big for cloud planning, there's room for both of us. Historically, and I know this from watching Planning for the last, I don't know, 15 years. I was actually the Chairman at OutlookSoft, the application that SAP bought, so I've been in and around planning, even going back to the PeopleSoft days. Anaplan's focus in terms of where they compete tends to get more sales and operational, and we're HR and finance. HR and finance fit Workday. In today's environment, workforce planning is super, super critical and super strategic. And it dovetails nicely with our HR strategy, and the same with financial planning. So I don't know if you -- I don't know how much we see them, but we've had a successive set of great quarters. And so I don't think that that's because -- I don't know, maybe we're taking some share, but the market's big enough for both of us. And I do think that our focus on HR and finance are where customers are focused right now. If you're going through this pandemic, what are you thinking about? You're thinking about how am I going to reprioritize all my financial investments? What's my business planning going to look like in a subdued demand environment? How am I going to reorganize the company in the same thing? So it's financial planning and workforce planning. I mean those are the 2 things that people are looking to do.

Kash Rangan

analyst
#44

Got it. One thing that I noticed in my follow-up calls with company managements in the past several days, there was definitely a distinct difference between CEOs that have been through multiple market cycles before, whether it's you or Marc or Pam and other CEOs without any names, they have been very successful business builders but not been through these cycles before. Your camp, the camp that you're in, definitely sounds a little bit more cautious about the world in general. Although the markets are definitely pointed up, but the caution was expressed in lower guidance for the second half, whether it's you or Salesforce or VMware. Maybe talk to us about how do you see the second half shaping up. Have you sort of buffered your guidance for things that could potentially go wrong? Just one question that I got, is Workday had a great quarter. Salesforce had a good quarter, but they're guiding conservatively. Are they seeing something that our forward-looking indicators are or they're just being cautious because these executives have been through multiple cycles before, and so they are going to be, by default, a little bit more cautious.

Aneel Bhusri

executive
#45

Yes. I think it's a bit of both. V-shaped recovery for the general U.S. economy, that does not seem that likely to me. And having gone up through '08, '09, 9/11 and 1999 dot-com, plus the economies just don't come back that quickly. They can come back over a couple of years, but they don't bounce back in 1 quarter or 2 quarters. It just -- I just haven't seen that. If it happened, great. So we'll be ready for that, but that's one aspect of it. And two, we saw deals push out in Q1, and we're seeing some lengthening of sales cycles going into Q2, that are tied to the -- 2/3 of it is tied to the industries that are really negatively impacted. You just have to remember that these sectors like travel and hospitality, they are constituents in our customer base. They're being really, really badly impacted. Industries like retail, technology, they're moving forward but financial services, but -- even health care, but transportation, certain types of retail, like fashion retailing, they're definitely hitting the pause button until they get more visibility on their businesses. So there's no way it wouldn't impact us. It's just the ripple effect. But again, I am short-term cautious. Medium term, trying to figure out what's going to happen in the midterm. Long term, optimistic because I think in situations like this, whatever trends were happening, they tend to get accelerated on the back end. And so the shift to cloud finance, I think that's going to accelerate whenever the world's stabilized. The people who were not on it could not close their books or they couldn't replan 30 times in a span in a couple of weeks. They're going to say, "I need that." This idea of continuous planning and having it tied to your core accounting system, analyzing all that data, that's the world we live in. It's such a dynamic world. And you just can't do that stuff with legacy systems, and it does not mean I'm knocking legacy systems. Hey, I was part of building one of them. I know what those systems can do, and they were not built for this kind of speed and agility that the world requires today.

Kash Rangan

analyst
#46

Got it. Justin, I don't want to mess with my screen and look for questions. If you have questions that have popped up, I don't know if you have that are ready to pull up any questions that clients have posted on the chat channel?

Justin Furby

executive
#47

Let me check.

Kash Rangan

analyst
#48

Yes.

Justin Furby

executive
#49

Looking at the chat channel, but I don't see any questions in the chat channel guys. So I think you're good.

Kash Rangan

analyst
#50

Yes. I think we're good. Maybe we'll put Justin on the spot. What have you heard from investors, one big question that has come up in your conversations with investors on Workday?

Justin Furby

executive
#51

Yes. I mean I think, Kash, I think there's a couple of thread lines there. One, more near-term focus on COVID. And I think we've been pretty clear that we saw some impact. We're seeing some impact in the more near term. But I think there's a lot of longer-term positives. And I think I've had a lot of -- and we were in the thick of this in March and April, I had a ton of inbound investor discussions. And encouragingly, a lot of those discussions were looking at calendar '21, calendar '22 and a lot of the opportunities that come out of this environment. And I think one of the really cool things, as I've kind of gone through the quarter and sort of looked at what happened, is not so much just on the new business side but more our customer base and some of the ways -- and Aneel spoke to this, but just how they're using it in a way that they never have, right? I think there's always been this thesis that we're mission-critical. But I think in this environment, that's been never more so the case, in terms of looking at how in areas like health care and some of these areas, people that are on the front lines and Workday has been a key part of that. So it's been a lot of work, candidly, in the last couple of months and kind of getting ready for the earnings call. But I think there's been a lot of really good, positive long-term multiyear discussions, which the near-term stuff we'll talk about, but let's talk about the multiyear opportunities because I think that's where it really gets interesting.

Aneel Bhusri

executive
#52

So if I could correct one misnomer, I saw several of the analyst reports talk about us as cloud ERP. We're not cloud ERP. We're cloud HR, cloud Financials, cloud Procurement, Planning and Scout RFP. All of these systems can get into production in 6 months. Maybe finance is a 7- or 8- or 9-month implementation, but these are not 2- or 3-year implementations, unless the customer wants to do some really big change management, which is out of our control. But what I'm seeing from prospects today is that they just want to get the system up and running as quickly as possible. And that's what we did in '08, '09. We had to readjust. And if customers want to have a 2-year deployment cycle, then we're fine with that. But in today's environment, we can say, hey, if you go with Workday, we also have a path to get you live in 6 to 9 months, depending on the area. And you can configure the system and change the system post go-live, which you couldn't do with the legacy system. So ERP to me is a stained word, and that includes supply chain and manufacturing and 5-year implementations. That's not Workday. That's not how we work. So I saw a lot of the...

Kash Rangan

analyst
#53

We'll come up with a new term, Aneel.

Aneel Bhusri

executive
#54

I think they got that wrong.

Kash Rangan

analyst
#55

We'll come up with a new term. I think we have been guilty of calling you a cloud ERP leader, but we'll have to come up with a more nimble term to express what you're really trying to build here, not 2-year go-lives, 3-year go-lives.

Aneel Bhusri

executive
#56

It's tricky, it's tricky. What we do are administrative systems, HR, finance and procurement and that's not the most catchy title, right? But that is what we do. When you get into production, supply chain and production manufacturing, those are hugely complex areas and that led to those ERP cycles being 3, 4 or 5 years. But we don't -- that's not what we do. That's not what we do. And I think there was this misnomer that, that was Workday and that, that would have an impact on the way people thought about us. We're all being impacted by COVID. I just want to make sure people understand what we actually do, do.

Kash Rangan

analyst
#57

Got it. Okay. Well, I think that's a perfect ending, unless, you have any closing comments to tell us. I think it went well. I thought this went well.

Aneel Bhusri

executive
#58

Thank you. And I was going to ask you when you get a haircut, but your hair is always long.

Kash Rangan

analyst
#59

So yes, I know. I'm officially excused.

Aneel Bhusri

executive
#60

I'm going to do my own.

Kash Rangan

analyst
#61

Perfect. Perfect. What do you think I should ask Mark and Pat? They're going to be doing this tomorrow and the day after and a couple of other CEOs.

Aneel Bhusri

executive
#62

Oh, I'll send you some questions. I'll send you some questions off-line. I'm not going to get into trouble with the whole world.

Kash Rangan

analyst
#63

No, I was just being funny. Thank you so much, Aneel. You're the best. Just absolutely love these presentations, and hope that we can do this in a physical format next year.

Aneel Bhusri

executive
#64

Yes. It's great to see you, Kash. Thanks.

Kash Rangan

analyst
#65

All right. Take care. Bye. Love to Workday. Cheers and peace. Bye.

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