Dave Duffield wrote personal checks of $10,000 to approximately 5,000 PeopleSoft employees after Oracle's hostile takeover closed in 2005. Then, at 64, he co-founded Workday with Aneel Bhusri and rebuilt the enterprise HR software market from scratch. Workday went public in 2012 and generated $9.55 billion in fiscal 2026 revenue more than PeopleSoft ever did. The $28.1 billion in total subscription revenue backlog as of January 31, 2026 represents contractual obligations already signed but not yet recognized, nearly three times annual revenue, providing future cash flow visibility that perpetual-license vendors could never offer. Subscription revenues of $8.83 billion were 92.5 percent of total revenue in fiscal 2026, with professional services accounting for the remainder. The company serves more than 11,000 organizations globally, including enterprises that have replaced legacy Oracle and SAP installations with Workday's cloud-native HCM and financial management applications. Switching costs are extreme: every employee record, compensation history, and organizational hierarchy exists inside Workday's data model, and migrating that accumulation to a competitor requires years of implementation effort and organizational disruption. AI integration drove over one billion platform actions in fiscal 2026 and contributed 1.5 percentage points to annual recurring revenue growth, with 75 percent of new sales including AI solutions. The share repurchase program retired approximately 12.8 million Class A shares for $2.9 billion in fiscal 2026, reflecting confidence in the business trajectory despite CEO transition planning and an 8 percent workforce restructuring in 2025.