Workday stock slides as Amazon cancels planned software adoption (update)

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• Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) reportedly halted a planned company-wide adoption of Workday's (NASDAQ:WDAY) human-resources software three years after the deal was announced.
• Business Insider sources say Amazon last year pulled its migration from Oracle's PeopleSoft to Workday because the backing database didn't scale to support Amazon's workforce growth.
• Workday confirms to BI that the deal struck in 2017 is no longer in place but there "is the possibility of revisiting the deployment in the future."
• Workday shares are down 4.4% to $228.16.
• 2 p.m. update: Workday shares have pared some of its midday losses after the company published a blog post clarifying Amazon's Workday deployment.
• "At Workday, we’re hyper-focused on meeting the needs of our customer community and innovating to support the needs of their workforces. At times, however, customers have a unique set of needs that are different from what we’re delivering for our broader customer base. That's why more than a year and a half ago, both Workday and Amazon mutually agreed to discontinue Amazon’s Workday Human Capital Management deployment, with the potential to revisit it in the future," says the blog post.
• The Workday-Amazon relationship traces back to 2016.

Comments

[jarratta]

AMZN may invest more in HR on a per capita basis than any other company. Many aspects of its HR performance are impressive and add a great deal of value.

AMZN is extraordinarily skilled at analyzing software. I wouldn't be surprised if it found WDAY's offering inadequate at the scale and throughput it demands.

[The Stockify Investors]

No doubt there is a lot more to this that meets the eye. Amazon are notoriously difficult to deal with. This may be a get out of jail ticket for WDAY as Amazon would have been so expensive to service. They can now free up a lot of Amazon focuses resources to do more meaningful/profitable deployments.

[BAHAMAS1]

OUCH !

[serpo]

Wow wday stock has been an absolute dog in recent years

[johanvdwerf]

@serpo sure, a stock that triples in 4 years is absolutely horrible...

[serpo]

@johanvdwerf
WDAY is trailing by a country mile Nasdaq and its SAAS peers.

[johanvdwerf]

@serpo Simple graph check. Nasday 5 year graph as of 27 July has increased 183%. WDAY over that same 5 years has increased 188%. So no, it hasnt trailed the Nasdaq.

Your comment on WDAY being an absolute dog 'in recent years' is just verifiable wrong and unjustified. 188% increase in 5 years is massive. So is the Nasdaq performance of course. Acknowledge and let's move on....

[ghussey]

So, did Amazon stick with Oracle Peoplesoft?

[Jaydog022]

Hello ADP?

[Long Tail Of Finance]

WorkDay sucks for HR management. One of the worst systems I've ever had the displeasure of using. Hard to believe the company thought it was ready to be put onto the market.

[tlapp]

@Long Tail Of Finance Interesting because I would have said same about Peoplesoft or as many who had to use it, People Hard.

[guyjones]

How did WDAY capture 35% of the Fortune 500 as customers? The CIO's of those companies obviously disagree with your assessment. Goldman's Kash Rangan -- one of the most astute analysts in the Cloud space -- remains bullish on WDAY, as do I.

[magalengo]

@Long Tail Of Finance Agree, one of the worst software products I ever used in both government and private sector.

[mexicanhat]

I love WDAY, but this will probably go down a lot more.