In our many posts and reports on the topic, we have demonstrated the disruptive force of the cloud and the threat cloud-based businesses pose to the SITS ‘establishment’. The rate at which the likes of SAP and Oracle are buying into the SaaS/PaaS/IaaS sector is just one of the more obvious signs. Running shortly after the huge and ever-expanding Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce event, Oracle effectively gave over the OpenWorld conference to the cloud. Many of my briefings with suppliers over the past couple of weeks have been cloud-focused. There is some temporal alignment here – if the big guys are in the news with cloud announcements it makes sense for the up and coming players to play up on the marketing front – but it does not detract from the reality.
One of those realities is the NYSE IPO for cloud HR pure-play Workday. Due to go through today (Thursday), pricing is expected to be in the $24-$26 per share range, up from $21-$24 per share a couple of days ago. At the mid point of the new range, that would make the offering worth around $568m. As with virtually all cloud pure-plays Workday is undergoing impressive growth (revenue of $119.5m in the six months to July 31, up from $54.8m) but is not profitable (net loss of $47.3m vs $36.3m). We’ll see what the market really thinks of Workday later today and over the next couple of weeks as trading begins, but it is certainly irritating SAP and Oracle (note those Successfactors and Taleo acquisitions). We’ve been watching Workday for some time now and think it is definitely one to keep close tabs on. It is not the only emerging cloud pure-play with good prospects though - Splunk, Zuora, and Box are also piquing our interest and you can expect to hear a lot more about them over the coming year.