Aneel Bhusri

“Success begets success in terms of customer deployments and having truly happy customers.”

“If you've got five or six cloud apps, do you want a different user ID and password for each one? No.”

“If you stay very focused on customers and customer success, people pay attention to that - and in turn, they also want that same type of success.”

“Every employee at Workday thinks about how they are going to help customers be successful. It is a simple formula, but a lot of companies go out, and they don't listen to their customers; they don't try to solve hard problems, making it tougher for themselves to create a great business.”

“To really disrupt a big market, you have to look at the marketplace from a long-term perspective. You have to move very fast but knowing that disruptive solutions just take time to build.”

“Every time you see a new paradigm emerge, it's always new vendors that lead it. I can't think of one case where an incumbent led a paradigm shift.”

“Workday is constantly looking into the future and, you know, building applications that stay modern and relevant.”

“We work as a team, and that is a huge part of why we have been successful; we run fast as a team.”

“NetSuite was a really good company.”

“The best way to avoid bureaucracy is to have small teams who are empowered to make decisions and get their work done.”

“Tablets are more intuitive than a PC or laptop. They also have more real estate than a smartphone.”

“I think, in general, data protection really matters.”

“I would be amazed if Oracle does not buy NetSuite.”

“I have long been fond of comparing Workday strategy to the process of sending a rocket to the moon.”

“The debate between the cloud and on-premise is largely dead. The cloud has become mainstream.”

“When you get big, there's a tendency to get caught up in process and bureaucracy.”

“We invest very heavily in the employees. We get the return, and the employee gets the return if they stay with us for a while. So, we focus on people that will commit to us for the long run.”

“Candidly, when you go back to '07 or '08, it was hard to sell cloud. We started out by focusing on large enterprises on day one. Everybody thought cloud was for SMBs (small and mid-size businesses), but we made the leap that it was going to be for large enterprises, that they were going to replace their core systems.”

“You don't see a lot of great companies built on easy problems to solve.”

“There's no question: the finance market is moving into the cloud.”