Aneel Bhusri (Workday)
Workday has acquired cloud specialists Adaptive Insights in a US$1.55 billion deal designed to bolster capabilities across the finance and HR markets.
Revealed overnight, terms of the deal will see the enterprise cloud application provider acquire all outstanding shares, including approximately $150 million in unvested equity issued to Adaptive Insights employees.
Expected to close by 31 October 2018 - the third quarter of the vendor’s fiscal year 2019 - the transaction aims to combine offerings in a bid to build an enhanced suite of applications across finance and HR sectors.
“Adaptive Insights is an industry leader with its business planning cloud platform, and together with Workday, we will help customers accelerate their finance transformation in the cloud,” Workday CEO and co-founder, Aneel Bhusri, said.
“I am excited to welcome the Adaptive Insights team to Workday and look forward to coming together to continue delivering industry-leading products that equip finance organisations to make even faster, better business decisions to adapt to change and to drive growth.”
According to Bhusri, Workday will combine the Adaptive Insights business planning cloud with its own finance and HR applications, targeting “thousands of customers of all sizes” across the world.
Specifically, Bhusri said the combined entity will enable customers to “better plan, execute, and analyse” across the enterprise all in one system.
From a logistics perspective, Adaptive Insights will continue to be led by CEO Tom Bogan, reporting to Aneel Bhusri.
“Joining forces with Workday accelerates our vision to drive holistic business planning and digital transformation for our customers,” Adaptive Insights CEO, Tom Bogan, CEO, added.
“Most importantly, both Adaptive Insights and Workday have an employee-first and customer-centric approach to developing enterprise software that will only increase the power of the combined companies.”
Headquartered in Palo Alto, California, Adaptive Insights has a customer base in excess of more than 3,800 organisations, including A10 Networks, Infoblox and Ivanti, in addition to Konica Minolta, Rimini Street and Tenable Network Security.
At this stage, it’s unclear how the acquisition will impact Adaptive Insights’ channel ecosystem, with key partners spanning solution providers, global system integrators and independent software vendors.
Optimistic about its future, Workday has been on somewhat of a buying spree recently, with the software-as-a-service (SaaS) specialists also expanding machine learning capabilities with the acquisition of Rallyteam in early June.
Closer to home, as recently as last year, Workday opened a new Asia Pacific Japan (APJ) headquarters in Singapore.
Led by Australian native David Hope, the company has approximately 200 employees across the APJ region, in locations such as Tokyo, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, Sydney, Melbourne and Auckland.
