Despite loss, Workday beats Q3 earnings expectations

Rachel King
Updated
Workday's Financial Management portfolio also surpassed the 100-customer milestone during the quarter.

Kicking off a short and quiet holiday week, Workday published third quarter earnings after the bell on Monday.

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The HCM software provider reported a net loss of $59.9 million, or 33 cents per share (statement).

On a non-GAAP basis the loss rang up to three cents per share on a revenue of $215.1 million, up 68 percent year-over-year.

Wall Street was bracing for a loss of 10 cents per share on revenue of $205.27 million.

Workday's Financial Management portfolio also surpassed the 100-customer milestone during the quarter.

Highlighting the Bay Area company's annual meetup earlier this month attracting more than 4,500 attendees, CEO Aneel Bhusri briefly reflected on the quarter in prepared remarks:

We had a strong third quarter and saw increasing customer demand globally. We also welcomed a record number of customers to our eighth annual customer conference, Workday Rising, where we announced our newest suite of applications, Workday Insight Applications, to deepen the value our customers gain with one system in the cloud for finance and human resources.

For the current quarter, Wall Street is counting a slightly smaller loss at nine cents per share on revenue of $220.46 million.

Workday chief financial officer Mark Peek followed up with a Q4 revenue guidance range of $219 and $222 million, translating to growth of 54 to 56 percent year-over-year.

Looking forward even more, Workday noted in the report that it will push select Insight Applications for data insights and predictions into general availability during 2015.

Insight Applications, a suite providing analytics via machine learning algorithms and data science, was first unveiled amid Workday Rising this month.