Welcome to Workday's Second Quarter Fiscal Year 2021 Earnings Call. At this time, all participant are in a listen-only mode. We will conduct a question-and-answer session towards the end of the call. And with that, I will now hand it over to Justin Furby, Senior Director of Investor Relations.

Welcome to Workday's second quarter fiscal '21 earnings conference call. On the call, we have Aneel Bhusri, our Co-CEO; Chano Fernandez, our Co-CEO; Robynne Sisco, our President and CFO; Tom Bogan, our Vice Chairman; and Pete Schlampp, our Executive Vice President of Product Development following prepared remarks, we will take questions. Our press release was issued after close of market and is posted on our website where this call is being simultaneously webcast. Before we get started, we want to emphasize that some of our statements on this call, particularly our guidance, are based on the information we have as of today and include forward-looking statements regarding our financial results, applications, customer demand, operations and other matters. These statements are subject to risks, uncertainties and assumptions, including those related to the impacts of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic on our business and global economic conditions. Please refer to the press release and the risk factors and documents we file with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including our most recent quarterly report on Form 10-Q for additional information on risks, uncertainties and assumptions that may cause actual results to differ materially from those set forth in such statements. In addition, during today's call, we will discuss non-GAAP financial measures, which we believe are useful as supplemental measures of Workday's performance. These non-GAAP measures should be considered in addition to and not as a substitute for or in isolation from GAAP results. You can find additional disclosures regarding these non-GAAP measures, including reconciliations with comparable GAAP results, in our earnings press release and on the Investor Relations page of our website. The webcast replay of this call will be available for the next 90 days on our company website under the Investor Relations link. Also, the customers page of our website includes a list of selected customers and is updated monthly. Our third quarter quiet period begins on October 16, 2020. Unless otherwise stated, all financial comparisons in this call will be to our results for the comparable period of our fiscal 2020. With that, let me hand it over to Aneel.

Thank you, Justin, and welcome to Workday's second quarter fiscal year '21 earnings conference call. I'm pleased to report that Workday delivered a strong second quarter with healthy demand across all product areas and geographies. Despite the challenging environment, our success as a company continues to be driven by the forward-thinking companies that expect more from their enterprise applications and choose Workday as their partner for finance and HR. I'm very proud of our workmates across the globe who came together in such a remarkable way, and mostly working from their home offices to drive these strong Q2 results. We're obviously living in unique times, simultaneously navigating a health care crisis, an economic crisis and a social crisis. This year will no doubt be one we will remember for all of our lives. It's also a moment in time that businesses and their leaders are in a unique position to drive change for the good and demonstrate that companies can and should have a soul. To that end, we have taken a leadership role in addressing social inequality and continuing to drive diversity and inclusion at Workday. To help move us forward, we have recruited some of the most passionate and brightest minds from across Workday into an accelerated team guided by our Chief Diversity Officer, Karen Taylor. We have four guiding principles: number one, building inclusive products and technologies; number two, hiring and developing diverse talent; number three, cultivating a culture of belonging; and number four, strengthening our communities. Our accelerated team is focused on helping us identify priorities and metrics that will help us drive and measure success against these principles. We look forward to updating you on our progress in the near future. Moving on to the business highlights. We had another strong quarter for Workday HCM,…

Thank you, Aneel. I'm incredibly grateful to yourself, Dave and the entire Board for the trust you have placed in me. It's an honor. I'm thrilled to partner with you and our exceptional workmates across the globe on our exciting journey ahead. Before providing my update, I wanted to begin by echoing Aneel's comments and express my thanks and appreciation to our field team for a strong Q2. I am pleased with our progress, especially in the context of the ongoing macro uncertainty, and it was good to see the solid performance across our segments, regions, products. Many businesses seem to be settling into this uncertain environment and increasingly realizing the need to move forward with their digital transformation initiatives. This, along with our strong execution drove improving conversion rates in Q2 relative to what we experienced in the March-April time frame. Our second quarter performance was broad-based and included strong results from both net new and back-to-base teams. In the large enterprise, we landed nine new global 2,000 HCM customers and two Global 2000 FINS deals. We also saw strength in our education and government team highlighted by the win of the state of Oklahoma, and we have a growing pipeline of state and local government opportunities. The medium enterprise also had another solid quarter, continuing a multi-quarter trend. From a regional perspective, North America and APAC were standouts, and we had improving performance in Europe. The back-to-base team delivered another solid quarter with over 50% growth again this quarter, driven by strength across products, including FINS, workforce and financial planning, Prism Analytics, learning, Scout RFP and newly launched Accounting Center. It's early, but we're also encouraged by pipeline creation from some of our newest products, including health, Workday Extend, people analytics. Going forward, we remain cautiously optimistic that market dynamics will slowly improve as we approach year-end and head into FY '22. More importantly, we are extremely optimistic on the longer-term opportunity that will come from this environment, as businesses increasingly realize the importance of Workday in navigating and driving times of change. With that, I will turn it over to our newly minted President, Robynne Sisco. Congrats, Robynne. Over to you.

Thanks, Chano. I look forward to continuing our partnership and supporting you in your new role. As Aneel and Chano both noted, Q2 was a very solid quarter despite an uncertain environment, driven by strong execution against a slightly improved market backdrop as many companies continued with their digital transformation initiatives. I'm going to briefly recap our second quarter results, update our guidance for Q3 and FY '21 and then open it up for your questions. Subscription revenue in the second quarter was $932 million, up 23% year-over-year. The outperformance was driven by strong renewals, favorable new business linearity and a onetime benefit of $6 million from the acceleration of revenue on a customer contract. Professional services revenue was $130 million, and total revenue was $1.062 billion. Total revenue outside the U.S. was $257 million, 24% of the total. Subscription revenue backlog was $8.60 billion at the end of the second quarter growth of 22% year-over-year. The backlog performance was driven by strong new ACV bookings across both net new and add-on business. In addition, we once again experienced strong renewals with gross retention over 95% and net retention, which includes upsells at the time of renewal, over 100%. Subscription revenue backlog that will be recognized within the next 24 months was $5.78 billion, growth of 21%. Our non-GAAP operating income for the second quarter was $258 million, resulting in a non-GAAP operating margin of 24%. The operating margin outperformance was driven by a combination of top line overachievement; slower hiring; continued COVID-related moderation of operating expenses, including travel and marketing; and some onetime credits related to canceled events. Q2 operating cash flow was $157 million, growth of 57% year-over-year, driven by solid collections and moderated spending. We continue to work with customers, both new and existing, that request more…

[Operator Instructions] Our first question come from the line of Kirk Materne of Evercore ISI. Please proceed with your questions.

Congrats on the quarter and congratulations to Chano on the promotion. Well deserved. I think my question is for Aneel. Aneel, I think there was some concern amongst investors that companies that were in the more traditional back-office categories of software, maybe namely HCM and ERP, would get shoved to the back of the line in terms of spending priorities due to COVID. And I think with these results, that thesis was clearly a bit faulty. So I was wondering if you could talk about how customers are thinking about Workday relative to their other mission-critical systems in terms of prioritization around spend? And then why the conversations you're having today maybe put you in a different category versus some of the traditional ERP vendors?

Thanks, Kirk. So first of all, I think the most important piece is we're not an ERP vendor. I think there's a lot of connotations with ERP that are 2- to 3-year implementations that the payback takes a long time. We're quick to implement HR and finance systems really oriented towards employees and running the business in a very agile environment. So on the HR side, very simply, with the pandemic and with all the other issues facing companies right now, employees are front and center for everybody. And you should think about HCM, not just as a back-office system, but an employee engagement system. But also with the pandemic, companies have had to change their business processes radically, and they're changing them on a weekly basis. And the legacy systems just can't do that. So we saw some holdouts of companies that were working with legacy systems just decide, "Hey, we just need to make the plunge and go into the cloud even though we're in the middle of the pandemic." Similarly on the finance side, the flexibility that starts their planning system, the ability to recreate and generate plans on a really rapid basis based on a system adaptive that can go live within a month and our core accounting system where you can close the books without having anybody in the office completely remotely can be live in 6 to 9 months. And so I think companies that are in a place to invest continue to invest in these data transformation areas, and they're embracing the cloud. And HR and finance are still very important.

And if I could ask just a quick follow-up for Robynne. Robynne, you mentioned, obviously, that most of the outperformance on margins was sort of due to the outperformance on the top line -- or the change in guidance rather was due to outperformance on the top line. In the back half of the year, do you expect to accelerate -- to accelerate hiring, rather? And how should we think about sort of your ability to raise -- to spend more in the back half, I guess, or hire more in the back half?

Yes, Kirk. So we said in the last call that we do expect to see slow improvements in Q4. So we've been planning all along to start reinvesting in the back half of the year, and we continue to have that assumption. So we will start investing in areas like sales, marketing, product and technology. And as I mentioned before, we did have some onetime benefits in Q3 that won’t repeat such as credits for canceled events. So we feel very good about our ability to invest in the back half of the year and to execute against those investment plans and a good payoff from that in the future.

Our next question has come from the line of Kash Rangan of Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Please proceed with your questions

Congratulations for the Workday team on a fantastic quarter, and congrats to Chano on your promotion. A question for you, Aneel or Chano, whoever wants to take this. As you look at your user conference Workday Rising, which has tended to be a big event where [indiscernible] together serve as a great opportunity for building a pipeline, how are you thinking about calendar '21, assuming that calendar '20 is going to be just fine as far as the forward look of business and build a pipeline for next year's business initiatives? And also, if you can just spend a minute on, we have been picking up from the field that there is pent-up demand for an integrated HCM financial system in the cloud that if you didn't do it, you’re stuck as guys as a customer. So how are you seeing that in your pipeline? And what is the adoption of financials integrated with HCM in the Fortune 500 segment of the market, is that poised to accelerate in calendar 21?

I think Chano is the right person to answer those questions. So I'll refer to the Co-CEO.

Thank you, Kash. So from a rising perspective, you are right, we made the decision to pivot and hold off Rising until next year, which is hopefully safe to get together again. And instead, what we are doing is introducing a special digital event that will explore the most present challenges facing businesses right now, which we think is more appropriate at this time. But I would like as well to highlight that Rising isn't necessarily a big pipeline builder for us. The primary there is customers and later stage prospects Kash. From a pipeline build perspective, I'm kind of looking out to next year, we've seen improvement relative to what we saw in Q1, which is encouraging, and we're moving closer to pre-COVID levels, but we aren't yet quite back to this from a pipeline build perspective. And with the biggest impact here in the verticals, we already call out, like travel, hospitality and retail. But there are as well a lot of areas. I'm very encouraged by -- in terms of pipeline build like what we are seeing in state of local government vertical, financial services, technology and media and more broadly on our installed base team pipeline, also that one accelerates faster, which can also may be helpful for year-end faster build up pipeline to support the event on the back of this year.

And on the financials, pent-up demand possibly for financials HCM in the Fortune 500 segment of the market, if that is the case?

What we're seeing right now in financials is that, if you talk to some of our partners and we're seeing it indirectly ourselves, there are a number of evaluations going on at this point in time. So a, we've seen some improvement, clearly, on the financial side. And it's reflected as well in some of the customers that we've been mentioning. But as what we are expecting, as Aneel was mentioning, that as we turn the corner from COVID and due to the number of evaluations that are happening and taking place now, it may accelerate. Again, the environment remains uncertain on fluid cash. So it's difficult to call out. But certainly, the number of evaluations out there has increased until companies have realized this environment, the need for that flexibility and agility that Aneel was talking about, and that cannot be on our legacy systems.

Our next question come from the line of Mark Murphy with JPMorgan. Please proceed with your questions

And Chano, I wanted to say congratulations. You've had the Midas touch in every single role that we've seen and just can't wait to see how it builds from here. I just had a question on the imprint of the pandemic on Workday financials. Because we've heard so many anecdotes of how modernizing finance is going to be necessary from a survival standpoint. And I'm curious if that is overcoming the hesitation that we've always seen to change a core system like that amidst a pretty uncertain environment. Well, I guess I'll just leave it at that.

Chano?

Yes, Mark, kind of what I've been commenting with Kash, right? what I can say is that I think companies -- and this is anecdotal but are realizing the need to modernize the financial systems, again, some of them is having challenges across the book remotely. Some of them having challenges to basically made the changes required. I can tell you, customers that are telling they are having people sneaking onto their business to download some reports and being able to provide the financial numbers, right, while their offices are closed. So clearly, the understanding and the need for the modernization is there, as you would say, from a survival perspective, right, to be able to accomplish some of these tasks. I would also, again, repeat myself saying that the number of evaluations that we're seeing out there and our partners are seeing has increased in the financial side, again, with the caveat, it's difficult to anticipate how the overall environment, which is quite uneven and fluid is going to evolve. We might be expecting that this might produce an acceleration on the other end. It's early to say yet.

Our next questions come from the line of Keith Weiss, Morgan Stanley. Please proceed with your questions

Excellent. Very nice quarter. A question for Aneel and related to Chano, congratulations on the new role. Aneel, with Chano now becoming Co-CEO, do you imagine your role changing at all? And how do you guys think about kind of dividing up the responsibilities between the 2 of you? Are you going to move into something that's like more strategic and Chano is going to be working on sort of the day-to-day operations? Or like how do you guys foresee that working with the 2 of you as Co-CEOs now?

Well, so Chano was taking on all of customer services and a lot of marketing, too. And that's half the company. And for me, I'm more of a product person and strategy person, and I personally would like to get back to working with our product teams and our venture teams and our strategy teams on where we go in the future. And then it's super important that we maintain the great culture that we have. And so working with employees is critical, too. So much like it was with me and Dave, two like-minded people are better than one in the CEO job. And it was my best experience at Workday, when Dave and I were Co-CEOs. So I'm thrilled to be able to share the role with Chano. And he's much stronger operational leader than I am. And so he's going to take over the things that are -- that he's really great at. And over time, we'll figure it out. We're great friends, and we'll figure out the right mix over time.

Yes. Go ahead.

No, you go first.

No. I would like Chano to comment on that, too. .

I'm very excited about the opportunity, clearly, and I'm really thankful, as I said, to Aneel and Dave and the rest of the Board. I think we are quite complementary, and we get together along very well. And we had a good point of views on kind of each other's areas. But certainly, really, really excited to be contributing as much as I can more from broader go-to-market, customer relationship as a whole, from the acquisition to customer success to services and clearly to support and driving the company going forward with the support of Robynne and the rest of the Executive Committee team. So I think it's a good breakout, the one we have right now. Quite clean cut, to be honest, but allow us potentially to play to the strengths that we -- that both of us have. So it's great.

It sounds great. And if I could sneak one last one in. Chano, you mentioned you're encouraged about the strengthening you're seeing in the new products. And you talked about Workday extend that seems like a pretty exciting solution set and that it can really expand the hand pretty greatly for Workday. Can you talk to us a little bit about some of the initial use cases and kind of workloads that you're seeing people put on the extend platform?

I'm going to hand over that one to Pete Schlampp from the product because I think he's in a much better place to answer that one.

Yes. Thanks for the question. So the first thing I would remind you is that Extend is more than a revenue opportunity for us. It's an opportunity for us to find ways to become more efficient in R&D because as we provide these tools to our customers, they're able to extend Workday in the ways that they need in their unique situations, instead of us having to actually go and build product for them. So that's great. Now that said, we've -- this quarter, we've seen some great wins, some great early wins with Extend, and pipeline is looking great as well. We've been seeing lots of use cases. I think we have about 100 different applications live today. One of them that just went live this quarter was a company that had built a self-assessment capability inside of Extend, so employees could self-assess as they were getting ready to return to work and determine whether they were ready. So Extend is about any type of use case, just extending the surface area of Workday.

Our next question has come from the line of Heather Bellini with Goldman Sachs. Please proceed with your questions

And again, Chano, congrats on the promotion. Just I had a question, and I don't know Aneel or Robynne, if this is best for you, but just related to the pace of business, throughout the quarter. You guys obviously had very good results. You gave rightly so, conservative guidance for the quarter. But can you talk about kind of how the pace of business evolved over the course of the quarter, if you could share with us? Then I just have a quick follow-up.

Robynne?

Yes. So we actually, Heather, had really good linearity this quarter. So on our earnings call last time, Chano had mentioned that he was starting to see more sales activity in May than we had seen in April. And we saw continued execution throughout the quarter, strong linearity, which added to our top line beat and good close rates, really strong close rates. And so Chano, anything you would add to that in terms of what you were seeing?

No, I think it was a solid performance throughout the quarter. A big part of, of course, of how was the quarter closed out as a whole. It's hard to draw a completely straight-line, Heather, and say that every month put better linearity. But clearly, the broader observation is that the environment has improved since March and April, as we commented, and has kept improving since then, right? But as I said before, the market remains fluid in the near term, which is also as well reflected on our outlook price. And again, the biggest impact we still see in the verticals that has been hardest hit.

Great. Right. And then, Aneel, just to follow up on your introductory comments, do you think that what we're going through and just the desire to have more modern systems, do you think this will actually accelerate people's desire to move financials to the cloud? I know that that's been a market that's taken probably longer than people thought to really make a wholesale shift. Is this kind of an accelerant of that trend, do you think, based on what you're hearing?

I definitely think it is. The need for agility, flexibility is so critical in today's world. And maybe if you were running your business the last couple of years, and there weren't many external factors, your core accounting system is probably fine. But I actually think the bigger driver for us is the broadening of the fleet. 4 - 5 years ago, we were dealing with our core accounting message. And if the customer wasn't ready to replace core accounting, we didn't have anything else to talk to them about. Today, we can start with Planning. We can have the conversation about core accounting, but we could talk about Scout. We can talk about Prism Analytics. We now have the end-to-end suite that took a number of years, so legacy vendors to build on-premise, and now we have it in the cloud. 3, 4 years ago, we just did -- we didn't have that scope for that breadth. And today, we do. And I think that's a big part of why people are moving. They don't want to just move their core accounting system. They want to look at procurement. They want to look at Planning. They want to look at analytics and then increasingly now for a certain set of industries, the Workday Accounting Center. So when you add that all together, we now have a basket of products that meets the needs of pretty much everybody, and they can move forward with comfort that we can cover their full needs, not just one part of their needs. And I really do think that's the bigger driver.

Our next questions come from the line of Alex Zukin with RBC Capital Markets. Please proceed with your questions

Congratulations on the quarter. And Chano, really thrilled for you as well. So maybe, Aneel, one of the interesting things, and you touched on it, I think, in answering Kirk's question, but I want to dig a little deeper. One of the interesting things we picked up recently in our field work is this increasing shift of power back to the HR executive and department, to your point, as more executives are getting concerned about employee engagement, talent management, mental health, diversity, inclusion in this new kind of remote world, and I guess the question is, what are you seeing from this? Are you seeing this in the field actually starting to impact sales cycles, pipelines conversation? And does this impact the secular growth trajectory of the HCM business as we kind of come out of this crisis or longer term?

In terms of the secular growth, that's a hard one to predict. But I would say that it’s part of our goal, but I've never had so many CEO conversations on the HCM product line. And I think the issue of employee health, mental health, physical health, how are they doing working remotely, how are they working on their projects, this new world of skills and a different world around talent, it's working to become a number one priority for the CEOS. So that is definitely elevating the CHRO to position within the company.

And then maybe just one for Robynne. Can you talk about that $6 million accelerated payment term and also any just FX impacts on kind of the guidance, headwinds or tailwinds?

Yes. Sure. So the $6 million was a result of a Workday customer, who was acquired by a non-Workday customer and therefore, they want to terminate their contract. So they prepaid the remaining balance of the contract, which should have gone several more years, and that caused an acceleration of the rest of the revenue across the contract, so a onetime event on that front. And I'm sorry, Alex, what was the second part of your question?

Just related to FX, in terms of the tailwinds or the headwinds with respect to the guide?

Yes. Really no FX impact to call out.

Our next question has come from the line of Matt Pfau with William Blair. Please proceed with your questions

Congrats on the quarter, guys. I wanted to ask on Workday Launch and the expansion of the solution to large enterprises. Maybe first of all, is this a response to perhaps the demand for faster time-to-value solutions driven by COVID? Or is this something that was sort of always in the works pre-COVID? And then what's the scope of this in terms of the type of large enterprises that could potentially use Workday Launch to get up and running?

Chano?

Yes. Thanks for your question, Matt. I mean, it was always kind of on the works once Launch was more proven in the medium enterprise across the board. And clearly, that offering was basically resulting in good outcomes in terms of both time-to-value and predictability of cost. So the idea was always to expand a bit more the upper and large enterprise. Right now, we're more on the lower end of large enterprise on the initial customers. So you could say something between the 4,000 to the 7,000 to 8,000 employees, kind of what we are implementing it. It can be across all verticals. Once you have basically the packetization of the full offering. And again, we'll provide both mainly both time-to-value and predictability of cost, sometimes on a fixed fee basis.

And does it do anything to your market opportunity in terms of potentially accelerating adoption or reaching customers that you couldn't reach previously?

It can definitely help on those customers that are looking for more proactive and predicted offering that will impact faster, quicker ROI, quicker time-to-value and also on those customers that are looking for a fixed cost, sometimes in terms of the offering of the implementation and have surprises. So definitely, it can be an accelerator on some of those markets we're applying.

Our next questions come from the line of Scott Berg with Needman Company. Please proceed with your questions

This is Ryan MacDonald on for Scott Berg. Congrats on a great quarter. Could you provide a little more color on Adaptive sales and the continued traction you see there compared maybe to the strong results you saw in Q1? And then also how pipeline is looking into the back half of the year for that?

Tom, do you want to?

Yes. So thanks for the question, Ryan. So we continue to make excellent progress with Adaptive. And I'd characterize it as, first, a lot of strength selling Workforce Planning into the Workday -- the broader Workday HCM customer base. I think that's an area that our teams have seen a lot of success. This environment really increases the importance of the criticality of doing effective workforce planning for many organizations, whether it be location, headcount planning, skills planning, training, diversity. I think those are all aspects that are important to our customers. But we've also seen a significant increase in interest in getting modern financial planning systems for organizations that -- I think we talked last time about the customer activity running multiple scenarios because of COVID. Perhaps not at the same levels, but that continues as customers think about their business and run combinatorics that are essential to understand what their businesses are doing going forward. So we've seen strong customer demand. As Aneel said, Adaptive and Scout both have rapid times to value, and that's important in this environment.

Excellent. And then just as a follow-up for Robynne. Robynne, just wondering if you've seen requests for flexible payment or billing terms from customers persist throughout second quarter and I guess into early third quarter here at all?

Yes. So we continue to do those requests. We got an initial wave when cover first hit, as you can imagine, but we do continue to see requests from customers. Some new customers, we see some request upon renewals. We continue to evaluate those on a case-by-case basis and to give relief where it makes to our hardest hit customers. And I do expect that, that will likely continue through the rest of this year.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your participation on today's conference. This will conclude Workday's second quarter 2021 earnings call. Thank you again for joining us.