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.
AI Copilot Summit NA is an AI-first event to define the opportunities, impact, and outcomes possible with Microsoft Copilot for mid-market & enterprise companies. Register now to attend AI Copilot Summit in San Diego, CA from March 17-19, 2025.
In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I discuss the top five candidates for the Cloud Wars CEO of the Year for 2024, focusing on the impressive leadership and growth strategies of CEOs from AWS, Google Cloud, IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle.
Highlights
00:14 — Who is going to be the Cloud Wars CEO of the Year for 2024? We’ll look at them in two different groups, five today and five tomorrow, alphabetically by company. Today, we’ll look at the CEOs of Amazon’s AWS, Google Cloud, IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle. Tomorrow, we’ll take a look at Salesforce, SAP, ServiceNow, Snowflake, and Workday.
01:07 — Let’s start with Matt Garman, AWS. The quarter in which Garman arrived, AWS had seen its growth rate begin to come back up. The company seems to be back in a very strong way. I think one of the best things that Garman did was to go into the belly of the beast, where he spoke at Oracle CloudWorld about the multi-cloud agreement the two companies struck.
02:18 — Google Cloud, we have Thomas Kurian, who’s been in the job now for almost six years. In the first five of those years, Google Cloud doubled its revenue. Kurian has done a masterful job in positioning the company as not just a big player in infrastructure, but also in data analytics, AI, cybersecurity, and increasingly in this interesting area of industry-specific solutions, like they’re doing with call centers. Very strong track record for Thomas Kurian.
03:10 — At IBM, Arvind Krishna is wrapping up his fifth year. First, he had to clean up a mess. In the past year, Krishna has been able to build the beginnings of a growth strategy for IBM around AI, data, hybrid cloud, and more in its strong consulting business. I think Krishna has also seen the company’s market share or market cap grow by about 50% since the beginning of the year.
03:58 — I’ve talked about Satya Nadella’s incredible record. But has Microsoft gotten too big to be nimble enough, or maybe after 10 years of intense work, does Satya Nadella have the passion and the drive for the business that he’s had before? One of its very large businesses in cybersecurity ran into a series of disasters over the past 18 months. A real strike against Microsoft and Nadella.
04:51 — Finally, Oracle. Safra Catz is the CEO. She’s presided over some incredible growth . Oracle went right up against three of the world’s largest, wealthiest, and most powerful corporations — Microsoft, Google, and Amazon—and has become a major player in cloud infrastructure. Its RPO growth rate last quarter was stunning, up 53% to $99 billion.
05:32 — So, you see from these first five CEOs, we’ve got some exceptional candidates for CEO of the Year. Tomorrow, we’ll take a look at Salesforce, SAP, ServiceNow, Snowflake, and Workday—five more excellent candidates—and then later this year, we’ll be announcing the winner.
