Workday delivers strong Q3, tops 3,000 customers

Workday's third quarter delivered revenue growth of more than 26% as the company saw strong demand and ended the quarter with more than 3,000 customers.

The finance and human resources software player reported a net loss of $115.7 million, or 51 cents a share, on revenue of $938.1 million, up 26.2% from a year ago. Non-GAAP earnings for the third quarter were 53 cents a share.

Wall Street was expecting Workday to report non-GAAP earnings of 37 cents a share on revenue of $921 million.

Workday CEO Aneel Bhusri said the company had 42 million users and was leveraging machine learning throughout its applications. Last month, Workday acquired Scout RFP.

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The company projected fiscal 2020 subscription revenue of $3.085 billion to $3.087 billion. Fourth quarter subscription revenue will be $828 million to $830 million.

On a conference call with analysts, Bhusri said: 

In Q3, we added 6 more Fortune 500 customers and 11 in the Global 2000. A few of the new HCM customers include Anheuser-Busch Inbev, Magna International, Royal Bank of Canada and Center Health. Some notable go-lives in the quarter included Glencore National AG, the Dow Chemical Company and Telstra Corporation. Turning to Workday Financial Management, we now have approximately 800 total Financial Management customers.

Bhusri also highlighted how Workday is going through a transition of expansion that rhymes with what Salesforce saw a few years ago. He said: 

Our HR has actually been fairly steady over the last not jut 12 to 18 months, but last 3 or 4 years. This was another strong quarter in terms of Fortune 500 wins and Fortune 2000 wins. As we get -- as we begin to close in on over 50% of the Fortune 500 running Workday, we're on that path to get there. We do look at the broader Fortune 2000 marketplace for HR. And we look at more of the international opportunities in front of us. There's still a lot of healthy growth in front of us.

For finance, and I'll just bucket everything else because in many ways, the rest, finance planning now procurement and Prism are really about the office of the CFO. That business continues to grow at a rate north of 50%. As we shared, it's 20% of the business. And I think there's durable growth in that business for many years to come. I would hope 5 years that that that business is on par, within 5 years, that business is on par or bigger than the HR business. It just takes time. And I would point you to the transition that Salesforce went through, They're 6 years older than us, one of our best partners. They went from being a sales company to a sales and services company to a sales and service and marketing company and platform. Now they've got analytics. We're going through that same journey and growth rates kind of ebb and flow as the different pillars take off.