Finance and HR software-services firm Workday, of Pleasanton, Calif., will put its primary development and testing on IBM’s cloud under a multi-year agreement, the companies said this morning. IBM called Workday — which went public in 2012 and now commands a market value of $16.5 billion — the second-largest enterprise Software-as-a-Service firm. Terms weren’t disclosed.
The win is important for IBM, which is striving to build its position as a cloud provider. Gartner last month in its Magic Quadrant ranked it as a challenger, not a leader, in the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) business, putting it behind Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Google. That ranked contradicted one by Synergy putting IBM third, with an 8 percent share of the cloud-computing market, which it defined more broadly than Gartner. Synergy put IBM ahead of Google (5 percent) and behind Amazon (31 percent) and Microsoft (11 percent), according to the Wall Street Journal.
Interestingly, Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos was an early investor in Workday.
Assessing the vendors’ all-important cloud revenue is made more difficult by their inconsistent accounting and segmenting practices. IBM said last month that it garnered cloud revenue of $11.6 billion over the last year, and that its cloud as-a-service annualized run rate is $6.7 billion based on the second quarter’s results, up 50 percent year to year. It doesn’t cleanly break out cloud revenue quarterly.
IBM lists FleetCor, Ethiad, Halliburton, Kaiser Permanente and Pratt & Whitney among customers using its cloud for “major transformation projects.” Last week, IBM announced a multi-million-dollar, five-year agreement to support Vodafone India’s IT environment transition into IBM’s hybrid cloud.
