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.
In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I discuss the emerging “Agents Wars” in context of the differing strategies of Oracle and Microsoft.
Highlights
00:18 — Agents are going to become an essential building block in helping businesses become the sort of companies they need to and to build the futures that they’re going to need to have to be successful and to compete in what will shortly be a very different business world. I am looking at this broadly as the Agent Wars.
00:49 — One fascinating early angle on this is how both Oracle and Microsoft are extremely bullish on the power of agents, but the companies are taking wildly different approaches on how they believe agents and applications will work together. If you look at Microsoft Dynamics 365, it’s probably upwards of $5 billion in annual revenue. Oracle’s total revenue for its SaaS businesses is more in the range of $14 billion, $15 billion and they’ve got industry apps.
01:39 — Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says agents are going to lead to, in some ways, the collapse of business applications that will move somewhat into the background as agents take over more of the functionality and the responsibility for helping to guide business processes. Microsoft’s view: We’ve got apps over here. They’re going to decline in relevance and importance. We got agents over here. We’re going to offer them differently.
AI Agent & Copilot Summit is an AI-first event to define opportunities, impact, and outcomes with Microsoft Copilot and agents. Building on its 2025 success, the 2026 event takes place March 17-19 in San Diego. Get more details.
02:14 — In a conversation I had with Oracle Executive Vice President Steve Miranda (see the full discussion), Miranda said that, yes, we’re very bullish on agents. We’re very bullish on applications, and our agents are going to be fully integrated within and inextricably bound to our applications. The agents exist to serve and enhance the applications to drive more value for customers in automating their business processes and how those businesses work.
03:26 — If even half of the glowing expectations and predictions about how important agents will be, it’s going to lead to an astonishing round of innovation and change and enhancement for how companies operate, how they run, how they share information, how they deal with customers. So the role of agents is going to be extremely important.
04:25 — Ultimately, customers will choose, and we are here at Cloud Wars, are huge advocates for customer choice and also for free market competition. I think ultimately these smart companies will find ways to ensure that agents work together. Like multi-cloud, there will be multi-agent strategies.
