Workday has announced the opening of its first office in Italy. The announcement comes hot on the heels of it opening an office in South Africa.
The office is located in Milan and will help Workday cement and expand its growing presence in Italy. When the South African office was announced they were recruiting senior staff for the new location. One of those is Francesco Mari, now head of professional services EMEA, who spent 12 years at SAP. He joined this month after a short tenure at the Cambridge Management Consulting Labs.
Workday already has a strong presence in Italy with more than 450 customer organisations using their software. These include AstraZeneca, Rolls-Royce, Roquette, Sanofias well as Italian-headquartered YOOX Net-A-Porter.
Laura Bruno, HR director, Italy and Malta, Sanofi commented: “As a multinational company, we wanted to create one global people management system, enabling our business leaders to work with a single source of truth about the workforce. Workday is transforming the way people work in HR and improving how employees and managers interact on HR matters. Critically, the continuous innovation that comes from the Workday community means that Workday is not only a partner today, but for the future. We are excited to see Workday expand its operations into Italy as we continue on our journey together.”
This brings its presence in EMEA to fifteen offices with a presence in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the UK. It also has regional centres in Amsterdam and Dublin with a total of more than 1,400 employees in the region.
For its existing partners in Italy this is also good news. The local presence should help drive more sales that they can support. Gonzalo Benedit, president, EMEA and APJ, Workday. “We are ready to help more organisations in Italy drive their business transformations—with one unified system for financial management and HCM that is easy to use, quick to deploy, and ready to support future growth.”
Fifteen or is it now sixteen?
Workday is accelerating its international growth. As it brings on board more European organisations the number of offices is likely to grow even faster. Another location it will formally announce before the end of the year is Poland, it is already listed on the Workday office locations site. It also has a new head of office, Agnieszka Frommholz, Senior Manager, Head of Branch in Poland at Workday. She started in February.
This could be the start of several offices in Central and Eastern Europe. It is also possible that Workday will look to open up South America soon and they may also expand further in Asia. The option of South America would be supported by Madrid but they may consider opening up in Portugal first.
What does this mean
While Workday may appear to be expanding rapidly it is actually fairly cautious growth. With 450 customers already in the country they immediately have referenceable customers and a significant number of relationships to maintain. In opening up these offices it means less travelling from one of the neighbouring countries reducing the cost of customer relationships in both time and direct costs.
Over the last year the Workday share rice has risen from $83.45 to its closing price yesterday of $126.63 (Source). More in country offices leads to more potential revenue. However, that potential is something that the new recruits will need to turn into actual deals and revenues.
