Carl Eschenbach, co-CEO of Workday, speaking on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos, Switzerland, on Jan. 18, 2024.
Adam Galici | CNBC
Workday shares soared 12% on Friday, one day after the finance and human resources software maker issued fiscal second-quarter results that exceeded analysts’ estimates and announced plans to further widen its adjusted operating margin through 2027.
Here is how the company did, compared to LSEG consensus:
Earnings per share: $1.75 adjusted vs. $1.65 expected
Revenue: $2.085 billion vs. $2.071 billion expected
Workday’s revenue was up about 17% year over year in the quarter ending July 31, according to a statement. Subscription revenue growth grew 17%. Net income, at $132 million, or 49 cents per share, increased from $79 million, or 30 cents per share, in the same quarter a year ago.
With respect to guidance, Workday is now looking for an adjusted operating margin of 25.25% in the 2025 fiscal year, compared to the 25% forecast it provided in May.
On a Thursday conference call with analysts, Zane Rowe, Workday’s finance chief, said he expects the company’s adjusted operating margin to expand to 30% in the 2026 and 2027 fiscal years, along with an annual subscription revenue growth of 15%. In September 2023, Workday said it was targeting a 25% adjusted operating margin for fiscal 2027 and subscription revenue growth between 17% and 19%.
“We are relentlessly focused on scaling all of our processes across the company as we review our product and go-to-market initiatives,” Rowe said. “We’re also becoming increasingly more targeted in our growth investments, balancing product development with go-to-market resources.”
Deutsche Bank analysts led by Brad Zelnick increased their 12-month price target on Workday stock to $275 from $265. They have a hold rating on the stock.
“The increased 30% operating margin target was the big upside surprise as it is now committed both sooner and greater than most were expecting,” the analysts wrote.
Citi, Evercore ISI and Piper Sandler analysts also raised their Workday price targets following the company’s report.
Conditions aren’t perfect for Workday, however. Organizations are still being more careful than usual before agreeing to sign contracts, Rowe said, adding that headcount growth among the existing customer base has slowed down.
Many other software companies have pointed to rougher economic conditions in recent quarters. But on Friday, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said “the time has come for policy to adjust,” an indication that the central bank will lower its benchmark rate. That might benefit growing cloud software companies such as Workday. Investors moved away from those assets and opted for more defensive investments in 2022 as they anticipated rate hikes to ward off inflation.
The WisdomTree Cloud Computing Fund, an exchange-traded fund that includes Workday, ended the day up 2% in Friday’s trading session. The S&P 500 index gained 1%.
But Workday CEO Carl Eschenbach did not suggest that market conditions will improve soon.
“In fact, we think the current environment of IT spending and the environment we’re selling into isn’t something that’s just been here the last couple quarters,” he said. “We think it’s the new norm going forward. We’re prepared because we have a great product.”
OpenAI has been awarded a $200 million contract to provide the U.S. Defense Department with artificial intelligence tools.
The department announced the one-year contract on Monday, months after OpenAI said it would collaborate with defense technology startup Anduril to deploy advanced AI systems for “national security missions.”
“Under this award, the performer will develop prototype frontier AI capabilities to address critical national security challenges in both warfighting and enterprise domains,” the Defense Department said. It’s the first contract with OpenAI listed on the Department of Defense’s website.
Anduril received a $100 million defense contract in December. Weeks earlier, OpenAI rival Anthropic said it would work with Palantir and Amazon to supply its AI models to U.S. defense and intelligence agencies.
Sam Altman, OpenAI’s co-founder and CEO, said in a discussion with OpenAI board member and former National Security Agency leader Paul Nakasone at a Vanderbilt University event in April that “we have to and are proud to and really want to engage in national security areas.”
OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Defense Department specified that the contract is with OpenAI Public Sector LLC, and that the work will mostly occur in the National Capital Region, which encompasses Washington, D.C., and several nearby counties in Maryland and Virginia.
Meanwhile, OpenAI is working to build additional computing power in the U.S. In January, Altman appeared alongside President Donald Trump at the White House to announce the $500 billion Stargate project to build AI infrastructure in the U.S.
The new contract will represent a small portion of revenue at OpenAI, which is generating over $10 billion in annualized sales. In March, the company announced a $40 billion financing round at a $300 billion valuation.
In April, Microsoft, which supplies cloud infrastructure to OpenAI, said the U.S. Defense Information Systems Agency has authorized the use of the Azure OpenAI service with secret classified information.
A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket is shown on its launch pad carrying Amazon’s Project Kuiper internet network satellites as the vehicle is prepared for launch at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Cape Canaveral, Florida, U.S., April 28, 2025.
Steve Nesius | Reuters
United Launch Alliance on Monday was forced to delay the second flight carrying a batch of Amazon‘s Project Kuiper internet satellites because of a problem with the rocket booster.
With roughly 30 minutes left in the countdown, ULA announced it was scrubbing the launch due to an issue with “an elevated purge temperature” within its Atlas V rocket’s booster engine. The company said it will provide a new launch date at a later point.
“Possible issue with a GN2 purge line that cannot be resolved inside the count,” ULA CEO Tory Bruno said in a post on Bluesky. “We will need to stand down for today. We’ll sort it and be back.”
The launch from Florida’s Space Coast had been set for last Friday, but was rescheduled to Monday at 1:25 p.m. ET due to inclement weather.
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Amazon in April successfully sent up 27 Kuiper internet satellites into low Earth orbit, a region of space that’s within 1,200 miles of the Earth’s surface. The second voyage will send “another 27 satellites into orbit, bringing our total constellation size to 54 satellites,” Amazon said in a blog post.
Kuiper is the latest entrant in the burgeoning satellite internet industry, which aims to beam high-speed internet to the ground from orbit. The industry is currently dominated by Elon Musk’s Space X, which operates Starlink. Other competitors include SoftBank-backed OneWeb and Viasat.
Amazon is targeting a constellation of more than 3,000 satellites. The company has to meet a Federal Communications Commission deadline to launch half of its total constellation, or 1,618 satellites, by July 2026.
Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, speaks at a cloud computing conference held by the company in 2019.
Michael Short | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Google apologized for a major outage that the company said was caused by multiple layers of flawed recent updates.
The company released an incident report late on Friday that explained hours of downtime on Thursday. More than 70 Google cloud services stopped working properly across the globe, knocking down or disrupting dozens of third-party services, including Cloudflare, OpenAI and Shopify. Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Google Meet and other first-party products also malfunctioned.
“We deeply apologize for the impact this outage has had,” Google wrote in the incident report. “Google Cloud customers and their users trust their businesses to Google, and we will do better. We apologize for the impact this has had not only on our customers’ businesses and their users but also on the trust of our systems. We are committed to making improvements to help avoid outages like this moving forward.”
Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google’s cloud unit, also posted about the outage in an X post on Thursday, saying “we regret the disruption this caused our customers.”
Google in May added a new feature to its “quota policy checks” for evaluating automated incoming requests, but the new feature wasn’t immediately tested in real-world situations, the company wrote in the incident report. As a result, the company’s systems didn’t know how to properly handle data from the new feature, which included blank entries. Those blank entries were then sent out to all Google Cloud data center regions, which prompted the crashes, the company wrote.
Engineers figured out the issue in 10 minutes, according to the company. However, the entire incident went on for seven hours after that, with the crash leading to an overload in some larger regions.
As it released the feature, Google did not use feature flags, an increasingly common industry practice that allows for slow implementation to minimize impact if problems occur. Feature flags would have caught the issue before the feature became widely available, Google said.
Going forward, Google will change its architecture so if one system fails, it can still operate without crashing, the company said. Google said it will also audit all systems and improve its communications “both automated and human, so our customers get the information they need asap to react to issues.”