Carl Eschenbach

Carl Eschenbach became Co-CEO of Workday in 2024, joining co-founder Aneel Bhusri in leading one of the most important enterprise software companies in the world. Eschenbach was previously a partner at Sequoia Capital (the legendary venture capital firm) and before that served as COO of VMware, bringing deep enterprise technology go-to-market expertise. Bhusri subsequently transitioned to Executive Chairman, making Eschenbach the sole CEO. Workday is the leading cloud-native enterprise software platform for human capital management (HCM) and financial management, competing against legacy on-premise systems (particularly SAP and Oracle) and other cloud platforms. Over 10,000 organizations globally use Workday to manage their workforce — from recruiting and onboarding through payroll, benefits, talent management, and workforce planning — as well as their financial operations. Workday's cloud-native architecture and continuous update model give it significant advantages over legacy ERP systems that require expensive, disruptive upgrade cycles. Eschenbach's priorities include accelerating revenue growth (particularly in the financial management segment, which is less penetrated than HCM), expanding internationally, embedding AI throughout the platform (Workday Illuminate), and improving operational efficiency. Key stock drivers include subscription revenue growth, large deal activity, the pace of financial management adoption, AI feature monetization, international expansion, margin improvement trajectory, and the competitive dynamics with SAP (which is aggressively pushing its own cloud HCM offering, SuccessFactors), Oracle (HCM Cloud), and other enterprise software providers.