Walmart goes Workday, not SAP

Tom Paine

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Walmart has chosen Workday as its HCM (Human Capital Management) vendor, reportedly besting the incumbent, SAP's SuccessFactors.

Walmart has over 2 million employees. It has been using SAP HCM and SuccessFactors.

A Wall Street analyst initially disclosed the signing of the yet unnamed customer, and Investor's Business Daily picked up the story. A quick look at a list of the world's largest employers suggested it might be Walmart, and Workday soon confirmed it was in a statement.

Workday (NYSE:WDAY) shares rose almost 10% after news of the deal came out.


Workday CEO Aneel Bhusri had spoken in November about how SuccessFactors (and Oracle Fusion) had difficulty in scaling:

"And what I’d say is, actually we’re seeing the first wave of failed [SAP SuccessFactors] Employee Central and failed [Oracle] Fusion implementations in Europe. That’s not marketing, that’s just the reality — when you get to a certain scale, neither of those companies have been able to get large customers live. So people have gone down that path with a project, failed, and come back to Workday."

Walmart had agreed to roll out SuccessFactors 1n 2010, but its unclear what degree of success it had in doing so.

Just in late November, SuccessFactors landed Microsoft and its 114,000 employees. But a column today by Mary Jo Foley jn ZDNet suggests that Microsoft might build its own HCM apps, to tie into LinkedIn, though those apps might not be geared to massive customers.