Sunday, September 02, 2012

(BN) IPO-Bound Workday Said to Win Contract for Google’s HR


Aug. 31 (Bloomberg) -- Workday Inc., the business-software maker planning an initial public offering, has signed up a big customer in Google Inc. for its online tools to manage employee operations, two people familiar with the deal said.

Workday, based in Pleasanton, California, would replace parts of Google's home-grown human resources software for tens of thousands of its employees, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the information isn't public. The world's largest Internet search engine has hired Deloitte LLP to help integrate Workday's software, they said.

The deployment is a coup for Workday, the cloud-computing company that's been winning deals for its HR and financial management software against market leaders SAP AG and Oracle Corp. Workday plans to raise as much as $400 million in a public offering, it said in a regulatory filing yesterday.

The online business-software company was founded by David Duffield and Aneel Bhusri, two former top executives at HR- software pioneer PeopleSoft Inc. Along with online-software maker Salesforce.com Inc., Workday has been peeling business away from Oracle -- which bought PeopleSoft in a hostile $10.3 billion takeover in 2005 -- and SAP, the largest maker of enterprise applications.

Katelin Todhunter-Gerberg, spokeswoman for Mountain View, California-based Google, declined to comment. Eric Glass, a spokesman for Workday, didn't immediately return calls seeking comment.

Workday had $134.4 million in sales for the year ended Jan. 31, and a net loss of $79.6 million, according to its S-1 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Workday's more than 325 customers include Flextronics International Ltd., Kimberly- Clark Corp. and Four Seasons Hotels Inc.

The company would join a spate of enterprise software makers that have gone public in recent months, including Palo Alto Networks Inc., ServiceNow Inc. and Splunk Inc.


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