Workday

Dave Duffield had founded PeopleSoft and lost it to Oracle after an 18-month hostile bid that went through in January 2005. Two months later he and PeopleSoft colleague Aneel Bhusri started Workday in Pleasanton, California, with the same product, HR and finance for large organisations, but built from scratch as multi-tenant software in the cloud rather than something installed on-site. Every customer runs the same version and is upgraded at the same time, which Oracle and SAP customers at the time could only dream of.

Under the hood Workday rests on an in-memory object model rather than classic relational tables, which makes reporting fast and customisation limited. The IPO came in 2012. Bhusri ran the company until 2024, when Carl Eschenbach took over as CEO. The competitors are SAP SuccessFactors and Oracle HCM Cloud, the latter from the company that created Workday without meaning to.