Enterprise cloud applications company Workday (WDAY 0.78%) impressed investors this week with accelerating revenue growth and a better-than-expected adjusted profit per share. In addition, management was optimistic about the rest of the year, raising its full-year fiscal 2019 outlook for subscription revenue. Shares surged about 13% on Friday as investors digested the news.
While the company's quarterly earnings release provides some useful information, investors will have to turn to Workday's third-quarter earnings call to get more detailed insight into how the company's specific product categories are performing.
Image source: Workday.
Below are three key quotes from the call, including a look at the company's strong performance in financial management products, Prism Analytics, and more.
Accelerating growth in financial management products
In Workday's third-quarter earnings release, management said its financial management suite of applications continues to perform very well, seeing "accelerated adoption" by Workday customers. In the earnings call, management went into further detail. "Subscription revenue once again grew over 50% with net new [annualized customer value] for core financials growing over 60%," said Workday CEO Aneel Bhusri.
This is a significant catalyst for Workday, considering the company's consolidated subscription revenue is growing at a much slower rate of 35% year over year.
Prism Analytics is growing by triple digits
Workday's business intelligence offering, Prism Analytics, is seeing rapid growth in customer adoption. Indeed, the growth is so fast that management has decided to moderate its efforts to sell the product.
Bhusri explained:
So I would say on Prism we're less and less throttling our willingness to sell. It's much more about making sure that the used cases fit where we are with the products, but the product line is one of the fastest growing product lines from a net new [annualized customer value] perspective we've ever seen ... Triple-digit year-over-year growth, and as we begin to mature the capabilities and grow the used cases, we honestly expect that to continue...
Management breaks down its growth drivers
Since management doesn't break out its revenue by product type in its quarterly financial updates, some investors may wonder how the company thinks about its growth drivers. Fortunately, Bhusri provided some context during the call on how the company ranks its products as contributors to its growth:
Both [human capital management] and financial management will continue to be the primary drivers of growth in near-term with a strong foundation for future growth drivers in Workday Prism Analytics, Adaptive Insights, business planning cloud and the Workday cloud platform.
Later during the call, Workday co-president Chano Fernandez provided even more context, noting that the company's financial management applications suite is growing as a percentage of its product mix, but at a slow rate because of "the sustained solid growth in [human capital management]..."
It was clear from Workday's earnings release that the company is benefiting from strong momentum, and management commentary from the conference call reinforced this narrative.
