Welcome to the Cloud Wars Minute — your daily cloud news and commentary show. Each episode provides insights and perspectives around the “reimagination machine” that is the cloud.
This episode is sponsored by Acceleration Economy’s “Cloud Wars Top 10 Course,” which explains how Bob Evans builds and updates the Cloud Wars Top 10 ranking, as well as how C-suite executives use the list to inform strategic cloud purchase decisions. The course is available today.
In this Cloud Wars Minute, I share my growth projections for the Cloud Wars Top 10, based on factors like the impact of generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) and the economic climate.
Highlights
00:10 — I’m excited to share projections of the Cloud Wars Top 10’s overall growth from last year. I think this year, these 10 will generate $359.4 billion in cloud revenue. Six of the top 10 work on calendar quarters, so it was relatively easy to get their revenue numbers for 2023. For the others, I had to extrapolate.
01:56 —First off, Microsoft grows from $102 billion to my projection of $124 billion this calendar year, up 21.6%. Google Cloud, number two, was $26.3 billion last year. I’m guessing it will hit almost $34 billion this year, for a rate of almost 29%. Number three, AWS, from $80 billion a year ago to $91 billion this year, up 13.7%. Number four, Oracle, $12.9 billion last year. I’m betting that it will do almost $18 billion in cloud revenue this calendar year, up almost 39%. Number five, SAP from $12.7 billion to $15.4 billion, a jump of 21.3%.
03:25 — Number six, ServiceNow, $7.25 billion a year ago, and I’m projecting $8.9 billion, up 23%. Workday, from $5.9 billion to $7.1 billion, up almost 20%. Salesforce, $30.2 billion, counted 2022. I think they’re going to do $33.6 billion. For a growth rate, I’m projecting 12%.
03:59 — IBM is mysterious. It’s been releasing very little. $22.4 billion last year; I’m guessing it’s going to grow about 10% this year, to almost $25 billion, and then Snowflake, $1.9 billion a year ago, $2.6 billion this year. A very nice 35% growth rate.
04:30 — This shows that even in a very difficult economic climate, the enterprise cloud segment overall has grown much faster than just about any industry on Earth. The cloud is turning out to be all the things businesses need to become full-fledged members of the digital economy.
05:26 — There’s going to be a huge kick-in from the Gen AI revolution that swept the world over the last several months. So lots of good things coming. We’ll keep an eye on this in the next year.
