Workday has announced IPO pricing for its Class A shares at a range of $21 to $24 each. The vaule of the cloud-based ERP software company would then be $3.85 billion with 22.8 million Class A shares. The timing of the announcement comes in the midst of Oracle’s annual Open World event and is a significant given the relationship between Workday and Oracle. Workday’s founders Co-CEO’s Dave Duffield and Aneel Bhusri came from PeopleSoft who back in 2005 acquired in a hotile takeover by Oracle. The takeover was a bitter affair that saw signficant legal involvement, the Department of Justice involved and all sorts of objections from customers, employees, and executives. Many Workday employees are former PeopleSoft employees and lingering memories of that acquisition are present throughout the company.

It has been reported that the constitution of Workday is engineered as to avoid a future hostile takeover. Workday has a reported 1450 employees features a close relationship with Salesforce. Their third-party hosted payroll and human resources enterprise-class software solutions are seeing strong growth, despite reports that the company has not made a profit. As a SaaS enterprise solution, the industry will turn attention to the success of the IPO as a bellweather technology company in the eyes of Wall St. As the rise of Workday plays out, the rivalry with Oracle will certainly grow along with it and will prove to be a significant tech story featuring two distinct approaches in an enormous cloud-based ERP market that includes IBM and SAP. Back to the Oracle side, hardware, database, performance focus are components of Oracle’s enterprise offering and on the Workday side, a subscription-base, cloud approach that is rooted without a hardware focus.  Oracle’s CEO Larry Ellison has been quite vocal regarding Workday and has touted advantages over the product.  Workday has benefited from a nimble and complete solution.  This aims to be a great show to watch.