Enterprise services provider Workday (NASDAQ: WDAY) recently announced its first-quarter results that continued to surpass market expectations. The company has been investing in products that make it easier for app developers to publish apps for expanding Workday’s capabilities.

Workday’s Financials

Workday’s first-quarter revenues grew 15.4% to $1.18 billion, ahead of the Street’s forecast by 1.3%. Non-GAAP EPS was $0.87, also ahead of the market’s forecast by 19.2%. For the quarter, net loss decreased to $71 million from a loss of $120.7 million a year ago.

By segment, Subscription services revenues grew 17% to $1.03 billion, ahead of the market’s forecast of $1.02 billion. Professional services revenues grew 4.7% to $142.9 million.

For the second quarter, Workday expects revenue of $1.234-$1.236 billion with subscription revenues of $1.095-$1.097 billion and professional services revenues of $139 million. For FY22, Workday forecast subscription revenues between $4.425-$4.44 billion. The market was looking for revenues of $1.24 billion for the quarter with an EPS of $0.76.

Workday’s Product Upgrades

Recently, Workday announced several new capabilities for its solution with Workday Extend. These new features continue to expand Workday’s presence in other business areas, especially finance services. The new capabilities will help with orchestration, data, and logic, allowing organizations to advance their digital acceleration efforts, unlock new business value, improve employee engagement, and increase organizational agility.

Workday realizes that many organizations have to move finance and HR data outside of the core system to connect and integrate with third-party systems. Workday Extend empowers the Workday customer community to build new apps that run within Workday core applications. It enables higher-value apps that increase employee engagement, streamline experiences, and optimize business processes while securely connecting Workday data to third-party systems. This extensibility keeps the context of data, process flow, user experience, and security in place to deliver enhanced app experiences, unlike other systems that run outside of Workday that require re-building integrations, rationalizing user interfaces and security.

It recently also released Workday Orchestrate, a service that allows app developers to have the ability to manage finance and people processes across Workday and third-party systems. These capabilities are built visually using a drag-and-drop user interface, Orchestration Builder, that provides a simplified low-code developer experience to define logic, map data, and perform transformations. The capability will help accelerate app development time while reducing complexity and costs.

Analysts believe that as the current economic and pandemic crisis alleviates, the spending by customers on IT activities will increase, thus accelerating the adoption curve. This strength might take time to fully translate into reported numbers, but analysts see Workday’s investments to bear results soon.

Its stock is trading at $226.41 with a market capitalization of $55.9 billion. It hit a 52-week high of $282.77 in February and a 52-week low of $169.70 in June last year.