Workday has launched the first wave of its key accelerator program in EMEA, as announced at its Workday Rising conference in Stockholm.
Following the recent launch of the same program in the US, the EMEA accelerator will specifically target banking and capital markets and insurance industries in the UK to speed up their enterprise cloud implementation efforts, alongside Workday partners Deloitte and PwC.
Workday will be adding more industries, countries and partners to its ecosystem in an effort to support its rapid mass expansion scheme, with a steep target of $10bn revenue by 2025.
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The move comes with an announcement that Workday will branch beyond curating its monopoly of upper-echelon income businesses and will begin to target mid-size market firms across the globe. To date, over 9,500 companies across 14 industries have shifted to the Workday cloud, with more than 50 percent of the Fortune 500 under its belt for its HR, finance and adaptive planning solutions.
“About 30 percent of our business is coming internationally; that’s a growing percent of our business and we have very large opportunities we continue to expand,” said Pete Schlampp, chief strategy officer at Workday, at yesterday’s Workday Rising C-suite panel. “We need to be focussed on the areas that we go into and EMEA is one of them.”
With $1bn annual recurring revenue announced for financial service customers, the finance industry brought in a sixth of the company’s total revenue, as its second fiscal quarter ended July this year.
The EMEA accelerator scheme will now help the banking and insurance sectors leverage deeper industry and country expertise from global Workday partners and systems integrators for the Workday Enterprise Management Cloud. Faster time to value, lower risk deployment and faster community-driven innovation are just some of the key promise areas stated by the enterprise cloud applications vendor.
Specialized solutions including the Workday Financial Management and Workday Accounting Center will aim to deliver finance-reconciled data with regulatory reporting capabilities. For insurance sector companies, users will be able to move financial and operational data to the cloud more easily, leveraging Workday’s expanding ecosystem and industry-specialized solution stack.
“We are making product investments in payroll, and workforce management capabilities that help us get into a higher manufacturing base,” Schlampp added at yesterday’s panel. “We are dominant on the high-end of the market mid-size enterprise. Corresponding with the international growth, so much opportunity internationally is with mid-size enterprise, as opposed to large enterprise. As our business shifts from HCM only to human capital management and financial management, it’s so important to be focusing on the industries.”
Also at the panel, Chano Fernandez, Co-CEO at Workday, assured media and analyst attendees that the Workday addressable market was now far from saturation. He said: “We don’t have a penetration problem, we have an opportunity. I’d say we have penetrated less than ten percent overall worldwide. That’s even when we count some of the large customers. We will see big adoption of some of these newer solutions that we are taking to market.”
