Published on the 22/05/2017 | Written by Donovan Jackson

Cloudy HR/financials company opens Global Support Centre in Auckland…

If the announcement last week that cloud software company Workday has thrown open a support hub in Auckland conjured up images of low-skilled immigrants warming seats in a contact centre, allow us to put that misconception to rest. Instead, said Rob Wells, ANZ country manager for the company, these are high level people who are essentially running the global Workday operation in its ‘follow the sun’ approach to customer support.

“These are definitely not low-end jobs and in fact we have started to pull Kiwis who are working for Workday overseas back into the country who see exciting career options here,” he told iStart.

The Global Support Centre in Fanshawe Street has room for 140 bods but right now, some 60 are beavering away, with plans to boost the numbers to 80 by year end – and who knows from there, though the headroom in the facility does hint at the company’s ambitions.

“This is not an ISP contact centre by any means; instead, the people working here have deep expertise across data security and privacy, management and monitoring systems, and skills on enterprise software such as financials, analytics and human capital management,” the genial Wells explained.

Workday isn’t brand new in New Zealand by any means, with ‘big name’ customers including Xero and its first on these shores, Fletcher Building. Air New Zealand has just recently signed up, too. Wells said the company has around five years of local operations behind it; back then, it was, he recalls, just him and an HR product strategist. “We were having great fun being disruptive and introducing Workday to companies on both sides of the Tasman. It was perhaps three or four years ago that we were working on Fletchers as the first customer, so that was a great start.”

Workday is a good example of a ‘cloud first’ company which has stepped up to take big chunks of market share in an apparently mature environment. When Oracle bought out PeopleSoft back in late 2004, founder of the latter company David Duffield wasn’t about to call it quits.

Instead, he founded Workday within a year of the hostile takeover; Wells said he did so on the basis of his ‘experience of what previous generations of technology could deliver and could not’. “Duffield started with a clean sheet of paper in an era where Software as a Service was becoming available along with consumer grade user interfaces and capabilities that just didn’t exist 30 years ago. So, the foresight or luck or whatever resulted in a new architecture from scratch has paid off; others were initially dismissive [of SaaS], then have tried to buy their way there, but the problem [for those vendors] is that they have multiple architectures against which they have to deliver.”

A quick look at Workday’s global numbers confirms that it is doing quite well, thank you very much. Commencing operations in 2006, it today has global operations and a turnover above a billion US dollars per year (although, like many other SaaS companies, our very own Xero included, it hasn’t quite hit profitability, instead focusing on growth).

And is that growth coming at the expense of competitors, or is Workday growing the market for HR and financial applications? “Now, that’s an interesting question which I haven’t been asked before,” said Wells. “Most people who are buying have preexisting systems, so quite often we are replacing competitor’s products. But every now and then there is greenfields stuff, because Workday scales so well. Our biggest customer is Walmart, with 2.4 million users, so that’s practically a country, while one of the smallest in employee populations is Dexus, with two or three hundred. So, I think, yes, we probably are doing a bit of both.”

As for the potential for growth for its third global support centre – that would be the one in Auckland – Wells said the first one, in Silicon Valley, now has 6500 employees. The second, in Dublin, has gone from 25 to 750 people. There is potential for plenty of good jobs, he said. “This is an exciting place for us and Auckland has the biggest headcount already of any city in APAC.”