Workday

Workday is a publicly traded enterprise software company founded in 2005 and headquartered in Pleasanton, California. It sells cloud applications for human resources, finance and planning, and entered the corporate legal market through its 2024 purchase of contract intelligence vendor Evisort. Shares trade on Nasdaq under the ticker WDAY, and co-founder Aneel Bhusri returned as chief executive in February 2026.

Workday was created by PeopleSoft veterans Dave Duffield and Aneel Bhusri after Oracle's takeover of PeopleSoft, listed on Nasdaq in 2012, and has grown by acquisition into adjacent categories. It agreed to buy Evisort in September 2024 and relaunched the technology as Workday Contract Intelligence in March 2025, then continued an AI buying program that took in HiredScore, Paradox and Sana. A leadership change in February 2026 returned Bhusri to the chief executive role.

Workday at a glance:

• Founded: 2005 in Pleasanton, California by Dave Duffield and Aneel Bhusri, both previously senior figures at PeopleSoft before its sale to Oracle.
• Headquarters: Pleasanton, California, with an EMEA base in Dublin, Ireland and further offices across North America, Europe and Asia Pacific.
• Ownership: Publicly traded on Nasdaq under the ticker WDAY since its 2012 initial public offering, with co-founder Aneel Bhusri serving as chief executive since February 2026.
• Legal Technology Portfolio: Evisort, acquired in 2024 and sold as Workday Contract Intelligence, is the legal-facing product, sitting beside Workday's finance, procurement and HR applications.
• Market Focus: Large enterprises and mid-sized organizations worldwide, sold to finance, HR and procurement buyers rather than to law firms, with legal as an adjacent function.

What legal teams should know: Workday suits legal departments inside organizations that already run Workday for finance or HR, because contract data lands in the same system of record rather than a separate legal stack. Buyers should weigh that Evisort is now one line in a very large product portfolio, sold through enterprise agreements and partner implementers, and that Workday changed chief executives in 2026.