Carl, thanks so much for being here. Carl is one of the most respected leaders in our industry, and we're really lucky to have him. I've known him for two decades, covering him at VMware, and had incredible respect for what he's done, and he's been not only an incredible leader, but incredibly gracious with his time for all of us. So we appreciate you being here and being part of the conference.
Thank you, Brent. It's great being here. No sunshine, but it's still an amazing place-
Yeah.
to be here. Anytime you're at Pelican Hill, it's pretty nice.
Sorry for the June gloom. 18 months at Workday, maybe just share, you know, your perspective. There's a lot that's happened, but your 40,000-foot view. I know you've been around the company for longer than that on the board, but as a leader, what are your observations?
Yeah. So, I think it's been an incredible 18 months. I'm grateful and thankful for how the employees, the board, and Aneel have brought me into the company and allowed me to drive a lot of change, and be accepted by everyone across the board. It's been a great start. I couldn't be more excited about where we're at today and where we're going in the future. We're definitely operating slightly different than maybe we have historically done at the company, Brent. I think we're operating with speed and agility, and at the same time, driving efficiencies across the company. You know, we're making decisions faster. We're making decisions on where to invest. The company's completely aligned on our strategic growth initiatives, and at the same time, we're driving efficiencies.
We have this long-term vision and goal of having sustainable, you know, growth while driving margin expansion, and I think we've been executing on that plan because of how we're operationalizing running the company. For me, I've spent the first 18 months traveling the world and spending time with three different constituents. Number one, our customers. As I spend time with our customers around the world, they continue to ask us to do more for them. I think they do...
We've been talking about this notion of Workday being both an application and a platform at the same time, and as we really lean into that platform approach, they've been asking us to bring more and more on top of the platform, both organically from an innovation perspective and inorganically, so that they consolidate more on top of the Workday platform, like, for example, we did with HiredScore. So the customers are driving a lot of you know, where we're spending our time, effort, and dollars to continue to invest. I've also spent a tremendous amount of time, as you can imagine, with our 19,000 workmates around the world. We have an incredible set of leaders inside the company that I get to leverage. They have tribal knowledge that you just can't you know, beat, and you gotta be able to leverage it.
It's a truly values-based company. It's been a values-based company since, you know, Dave and Aneel started it now 19 years ago, and I lean into that. At the same time, we've been able to attract some incredible outside talent. We have a-
There's one here, right? His name is Zane.
Zane's here. We brought in a new CFO.
CFO's in the back. Sorry, he's not-
Uh-
He didn't want to sit up front here with us.
Yeah.
He was, he was scared.
It's always good when your CFO says: "No, you're doing it," and he doesn't do it. So we brought in a new CFO, a new CMO, a new CIO, a new head of Europe, a new head of APAC, a new head of Japan. We promoted from within, David Somers, who's been with us six years, to be our Chief Product Officer. And, just recently, we brought in a new head of federal, to run all the federal business, who used to run federal for Google Cloud, was the president of Google Cloud, federal business, as well as she worked for me at, VMware years ago. So the employee population is strong, and we continue to be a magnet for good talent.
And then the last thing is, I've spent time over the last 18 months with our partners and the ecosystem of technology partners that we have out there, and I think that's one of the biggest drives, transformational drives that we're having going on in the company and how we think about leveraging partners. I think historically, we've had partners that have deployed our technology, and about a year ago, we revamped all of our programs around partners, and we're doing things a lot different in how we think about expanding our ecosystem. If we want to claim to be a platform and you don't have a technology ecosystem around you that's supporting you, you're never a platform. So I think that's the other big change. So it's going great. I'm having a good time.
I'm super bullish about the future of the company. We have great people, we have a good market opportunity, and I again thank the company, the board and Aneel for bringing me in and giving me this opportunity to do one last run.
You know the software industry well, better than most, and you sat on probably the most important boards in software. But everyone's asking me, like: What's wrong with software right now? Why isn't it inflecting? Why is there no S-curve? And I know it's hard to compare against NVIDIA and others, but what do you think is happening? Is there a slowdown because of AI? Is there inflation, the interest rate issue? Like, what do you think is happening? 'Cause it's not only you, but we're seeing this kind of across multiple software companies, where we're in a little bit of a funk, and so everyone's like... We're kind of trying to put the pieces up on the board, trying to put it together. What do you think happened in Q1?
What do you think others are seeing? What’s—
Well-
What's the big picture from you on what's happening to our industry right now? 'Cause it doesn't feel like it... It doesn't feel like the pitch that the vendors are, are making. It's we're, we're all kind of underperforming the pitch. Even, you know, talk to Adobe, right? They talk about a 13%-15% TAM, and they're giving us 10% growth. You're like: Wait, what's going on, Shantanu? And I've had this conversation with them. So, like, what, what do you think is happening?
Yeah. So I'll start at the macro, the broader industry, and then talk specifically about us, and what we're seeing, and you know, talk a little bit about our Q1 results that we announced last week. So I think we've had a tremendous amount of tailwinds in software for the last three to four, even five years. I think a lot of that was on the back of COVID. You know, everyone talked about, we use this term, Brent, in the industry a long time, called digital transformation. I actually think COVID really drove a digital transformation. We all had to build out our infrastructures to support our employees in a different way. They're not all centralized, they're decentralized or hybrid.
So we all had to think about what we're going to do in the infrastructure to really drive a digital transformation to support people during the pandemic. And I think there was also, at the same time, a lot of pent-up demand. People weren't necessarily leaning into investing in technology, and that drove tremendous growth for the software industry as a whole, over the last many years. I think last year was a pretty solid year for most, you know, software companies. I think this year, people do talk about a slightly different macro that they're dealing with. They use terms like, it's choppy, it's uncertain, it's uneven. And I just think, you know, when people are going to invest in technology, they're really thinking hard and deep about where they're going to make those investments.
I think for all of us in the software space, you have to have a strong value proposition to make sure you're a priority for where they're going to spend dollars. It's not, Brent, that people aren't spending dollars, I just think they're being more thoughtful around where they're spending dollars. We saw that. We talked about that last week on our earnings call in Q1. We saw, you know, probably a bit more scrutiny than we've seen in the last year when it comes to big transformational deals or platform deals, where people are thinking about putting in a new HCM platform or putting in a new ERP platform or financials. These are big investments people have to make, not just in technology, but there's a services component to it as well. So I just think people have taken a little bit of pause.
I don't believe we're seeing, at this point, dollars shifting away from a lot of what we're doing in software, and it's all going to AI. I know some people say, "Is it all going to AI in our budgets?" We don't necessarily see that. In fact, when we spend time with customers, Brent, we're seeing customers say: What can we get from the likes of Workday when it comes to AI? What can we get in from, you know, the Salesforces or the Adobes or anyone else who's an existing platform or existing technology vendor for our customers? They want to get the technology called AI or Gen AI from those folks. So I haven't seen a shift in dollars at all, but people are investing, they're exploring, and they're thinking about how to leverage AI going forward.
Just on how to leverage it, where, where are you seeing the first signals, that AI is going to be a tailwind for you?
Yeah. So when we think about AI, I think we're taking a slightly different approach to thinking about AI, specifically on how we're going to monetize it, Brent, than the rest of the industry. We think it's important that all our customers get access to AI that's built deep into our platform, taking advantage of our highly curated data set. We have 65 million users processing 800 billion transactions a year on our platform. So we have a pristine data set that we can train off of to drive business outcomes for our customers. And our philosophy is we want all of our customers to be the beneficiary of AI that's in the platform itself. So we have not rushed to market and said, "We're gonna raise our prices because now we have AI built into the platform." It's been built in for a decade.
We have over 50 AI use cases right now on the platform, with another 25 rolling out later this year. Because we haven't rushed to market and said we're going to increase prices, the feedback from our customers has been incredible. They say, "Thank you. We appreciate your approach. We pay you an annual subscription fee. We expect innovation, and we don't want to be the haves and have-nots in who gets access to your AI." That being said, we do have a multipronged approach to how we're going to monetize AI going forward. A couple examples, talent optimization. It has about a 50% attach rate to all of our HCM customers, and that allows people to leverage the knowledge about skills to drive internal mobility for our customers.
We acquired a company called HiredScore, which we think is one of the best talent acquisition platforms in the market, completely AI-driven. That's another example. Extend Pro, I think we'll talk a little bit more about Extend Pro later, Brent, but this gives, you know, people the ability to leverage that platform, bring AI to an AI API gateway we have now, or our code... or people want to develop on top of Workday, they can now do it with our copilot later this year for developers. So we're monetizing it that way. And then lastly, there's two other ways. We have an innovation index that we get from our customers every year, and that innovation index is something we get to monetize just based into our contractual agreements with our customers. So that gives us a way to monetize.
Next week, at our DevCon conference, we have our developer conference next week, which will have over 1,200 people in Vegas, which is 2x the size of last year. That's why we're focused on a platform. People are developing on the Workday platform. We're going to be launching our AI Marketplace, where we'll have 15 partners and application vendors in the AI Marketplace that are highly curated. All of our security, right, a wrapper around it, and customers can now buy these AI apps through Workday, and we'll be able to monetize it as well. So it's a multipronged approach, but we do think our customers are entitled to getting some of the AI we have in the platform, and then we'll monetize where we think we can, where there's enough value, customers will pay for it.
... Just to, there were a few more questions about Q1, not to go back to that, but when you think about just Europe, many have said, hey, as SAP feels like they're having pretty good results, are they having some type of stall-out or effect on your customer base in Europe now, more so than you've seen in the past? Or has anything changed against SAP in Europe?
Yeah, so we announced our earnings last week. I thought we delivered solid results against all of our Q1, you know, guided metrics. We were above on all of them. We had a number of highlights in the quarter. We continued to see really good growth in certain industries, Brent, like our healthcare business, once again, grew 50%. We continued to see growth in state and local government. We had a landmark win in federal with the DIA. I think it will be the launchpad as we break into that market. As you know, historically, we haven't leaned into the federal government, but there's a huge opportunity there for us, and we're leaning into it, and the DIA is thought of as a thought leader in that market.
And then we continued to see success around full platform sales, which is both HCM and financials at once, grew higher than 20%, as did our number of financial net new customers. So I think we had a really strong, you know, Q1 from the results. At the same time, we did see some things slightly change. Specifically, we didn't get the performance we thought we would get out of our international business. As many of you know, for probably the last six quarters, at least six quarters I've been, you know, on the earnings call, we've highlighted international as one of our strengths. They've done a great job growing the business. And in Q1, we just saw softness across the board in both Europe... We speak about Europe because it's a much bigger business than APAC or Japan.
We just saw some softness in that area. The biggest impact was on large deals. In Q1 last year, we had a number of large deals. We didn't have nearly as many this year. And what's really important, Brent, is these customers and these opportunities are not leaving our pipeline at all. They're in our pipeline. It's not if we get them. If a customer decides, our win rates are up, we're gonna continue to get these big wins. And we do compete against SAP, to answer your question. We see them. Our competitive win rates haven't changed against them at all. You know, you guys know their results. They had solid results, but it's a little bit of lift and shift on how you get those results.
But we don't see them, you know, necessarily impacting our win rates at this point. If anything, we actually get the benefit of them enforcing and driving customers towards a cloud solution and the shift to S/4HANA. I don't think a lot of people realize when you go from their on-premise solution to S/4, it's a step gap. It's a gap step before you go all the way to the cloud, then you got to do another transition. So when customers decide to open the aperture and look at other solutions in the market, we get a seat at the table. In some cases, customers say, "You know what? I just can't afford to spend the time to go and look at an alternative solution." They take what SAP has to offer, and they just go with their migration path.
I think, you know, when we compete, I think our win rates are high, but there's a lot of opportunities we probably don't even get access to because the customers are just sticking with SAP in their migration path.
You have a lot of good pillars of growth. How would you label the ones that you're most excited about in looking across, you know, FINS, partners, international? You know, how do you kind of layer all these opportunities and where you're seeing the best uptake?
Yeah, so let's start with financials. You know, about this time, maybe, you know, 14 months ago, we decided to double down our efforts around financials, both on the product side and then the go-to-market side. We thought the market was at an inflection point. Even today, as we sit here, roughly only 30% of financials have moved to the cloud. So we think our investments are inflecting when CFOs are much more open to moving financials to the cloud. So we think the timing is right for this investment, and we also think our product has matured as well. Our product is, you know, it supports, in a very good way, multinationals, specifically here in the U.S., the U.K., and Australia.
We are investing in the product to make it much more internationalized, so you can sell it in a, in a domestic situation like, you know, France or Germany. So I think the financials is paying off, and as I said, it's driving full platform sales up 20% year-over-year. In our number of new units or new logos around FINS is up 20%. So those investments are paying off, and we're gonna continue to lean into them. Partners, listen, our partner, it's only been a year. These investments take time to pay off, but, you know, some of the statistics we shared in Q1, in Q1, we had more new deals being registered by our partners than we did all of FY 2024, in one quarter. And then we also had more deals closed through the partners than we have, right, all of last year.
So those investments are starting to pay off. We're gonna continue to lean into them. I know a lot of people in here probably go out and do channel checks and speak to the partner ecosystem, and I think you'll get the feedback that they're welcoming and embracing our new partner programs. We're also seeing the partners innovate on top of us, leveraging things like extend, building their own apps and monetizing them as well. And then lastly, you know, we continue to lean into the product side and making sure we're focused on innovation on the product to make it much more international. The TAM associated with Workday outside of the U.S. is more than 50, about 50% of our opportunity, yet we only get 25% of our revenue.
So if you just start at the bigger picture, how do we then lean into that, and how do we drive international growth through partners, through headcount, through leadership, through innovation? We do see that as a rich opportunity. So we're making these investments to maintain that profile of sustainable growth, with, you know, also expanding operating margin at the same time.
You made a lot of really good change. We hear it in all the partner checks we do, and they love what you've done. And so I think the question everyone has is: Is Carl's new roster done? Do you have most of the pillars in and the athletes on the field to now run, or are you still making more changes from just your entire go-to-market and the senior team? Is this all now pretty much locked in?
I feel really good about the leadership team we have around the world. I feel good about it on the go-to-market side, I feel good about it on the product. On the operations side, you know, we brought in a bunch of people like Zane and Head of, you know, Sales and Revenue Operations. We have a lot of great people in the company, and quite frankly, if we had more positions open, Brent, we could fill a lot of them. We have a lot of people wanting to be part of the opportunity in the journey ahead, so I feel really good about the people side of things. I feel really good about the investments we're making, right, to drive this durable growth, for both the medium term and the long term. We're being very measured how we think about those investments.
They don't happen overnight, right? Where all of a sudden, they're driving significant growth for us. We're measuring every single quarter, every investment we've made, and making sure we see the KPIs of the results we want, and if we don't, we'll pull back. We'll be smart about it. I'm not gonna lean into investing just to drive growth at the expense of operating margin. I remember, you know, starting here, you know, 18 months ago, and I said, "This is a unique company." And I very quickly saw how we could, you know, sustain really good, durable growth and, and drive operating margin expansion, right? It's not an or equation, just how we're operating the company, it is allowing us to do that, and we've expanded the operating margin by 500 basis points in the last year.
We talked about at our Analyst Day back in September, we'd like to, you know, be able to achieve 25%+ operating margin growth in the midterm, in the next one to three years. And we're already at 25% operating margin in our guide for the rest of this year. So we're expanding margin, being efficient, yet leaning into these opportunities to help us maintain our growth.
In any other industry, you'd say mid- to high-teen growth is great and a 25% margin, but investors are always like: Well, in software, 25% margin, we've got other companies at 40+, so, you know, is this gonna be a growth company? Is this gonna be a margin company? We're kind of in the middle, and everyone says, "Well, Brent, I got mid-teen growth, I got a 25% margin." It's -- I don't know what it is. It's not a high-growth company, it's not a high-margin company. But I've ... What I've said is, "Give Carl some time, I think he'll figure this out." What is the answer? What do you think it looks like two years from now?
So listen, yeah, if I can say so, there's not a lot of companies at almost $8 billion of scale with high-teens growth rate and 25% operating margin. We're a Rule of 40 company, you know, and we continue to perform very well, and I'm super excited about the opportunity. That being said, right, we're leaning into these investments we're making to maintain that durable growth. If they don't pan out, can we expand operating margin more aggressively going forward? Yes. Will we? It depends. It depends on whether or not we see the opportunity in front of slow down. We see the opportunity, so we don't wanna pull back on our investments. We wanna continue to focus on the opportunity that's ahead and expand operating margin.
If something changes in the dynamics of the market or the TAM that we're going after, would we expand operating margins more aggressively? We can, but I don't think it's the right time to do it. Sustainable, durable, diverse growth with expanding operating margins is a pretty good profile for a company of our size and scale, and that's our, that's our state of future. And we're gonna keep leaning into the investments to go after the opportunity and expand operating margin. And if we don't see that come to fruition, can we expand operating margins further? We probably can, and we will.
Does this feel more like maybe just the traditional black ice we've seen in Q1 in the past, where just you think everything's gonna hit and then it doesn't, but then it finally catches up, and it's just seasonality? I mean, could that explain part of this, or do you think there's something bigger?
Well, I can't see black ice. Maybe that's the problem. But listen, Q1s are always seasonally tough for most technology companies. We did see two things in Q1, Brent, that we talked about on the earnings call that made us think about our guide for the full year coming down $35 million on that $7 billion. Can things change? A couple of the things that we saw aren't necessarily things that are always in our control, right? The macro, we can't control. We can control how we sell, how we engage with customers, how we make sure we have all the buying centers, you know, in check. When we sell large transformational deals, it's no longer just HCM, Brent, it's HCM and financials. So now we gotta sell to three different buyers.
We're selling to the CHRO, who is the traditional buyer of Workday, we're selling now to the CFO for financials, and we're also selling to the CIO now, right? Because they're involved in these technology decisions 'cause they gotta support it going forward. So the sale's a little more complex when we go upmarket in these big transformational deals. We can control how we engage and how we sell. We can't always control how they're thinking and when this project's gonna be something they're gonna move forward with. What we have realized, it's once someone's made a decision to do a big transformational, you know, project like HCM or ERP or FINS, it's not if they do it, it's when. Again, this is where it gives us confidence it's not leaving our pipeline.
And then we also saw a slight pullback in how many employees our customers are committing contractually to us to happen on an annual basis. We did a forecast coming into the year. We pulled it down because we saw headcount growth slow last year. We pulled it down this year, and in Q1, it came even below our own forecast. So we took that into account, and we don't think that may change throughout the rest of the year, and that's what adjusted our guidance for the full year.
Nadella has this thing called Copilot, his killer app. Everyone asks me, "What's Carl's killer app?" Is there something you're really excited about that can kinda help the overall platform adoption?
Yeah, Brian, I think we have a whole bunch of good, exciting killer apps, some of them being, you know, AI and GenAI. But the one I think, at least for me, if you're asking me, and I think if you ask our product team and the rest of the company, they'd probably agree, is we're super excited about Extend. Because Extend allows us to truly be that platform where people are consolidating on top of, and at the same time, developing new apps through the Extend, you know, API. And with Extend Pro, people now have an API gateway into Workday, and we also have a copilot for developers that want to develop on top of our platform. So I think Extend is a killer app. Extend Pro is already 50% of our sales of Extend, as a platform. Extend Pro is the AI version.
It's already 50% of the sale around Extend, and I think it is gonna be the future. And this is why we say we're both an app and a platform at the same time, and very few people can say that about, you know, being that type of a software company in the industry. Both an app and a platform at the same time, and very few people can say that about, you know, being that type of a software company in the industry.
Carl, thanks so much for being here. It means a lot to everyone here and our clients and the Jefferies team. So thanks again.
Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.