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 dig into how Palantir and ServiceNow are positioning themselves as the defining enterprise software companies of the AI era.
Highlights
00:24 — I think we’re seeing some very interesting competitive battling between Palantir and ServiceNow, head to head, emerging over two categories. One, this AI platform position that they’re both talking about relentlessly as sort of the core of their strategic value. And secondly, they’re both on this kick now about who is the defining software company of the 21st century, of the generation.
01:57 — Both are talking up the power of the AI platform as the foundation for what companies need to succeed in this new AI-centric future. Which one has the right approach? How are they trying to position their companies, their capabilities, their ecosystems, to be able to take advantage of that? These are some of the things that I get into in detail in a later article.
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02:19 — We’ve also got both claiming that their results are just the greatest thing ever relative to the Rule of 40, which is for high-growth companies. You want to have a combination of 20% growth or more for revenue and 20% growth or more for margins, to have those equal 40 or more. Both exceed that number.
03:26 — Who’s got the momentum? Who’s positioning themselves right in this sweet spot for businesses moving into this AI future, right? Who’s going to be able to put together the tools that control the agents, that let all the data that’s needed for IE come through? How are they able to build applications easily on top of this?
04:05 — But right now, I think ServiceNow and Palantir are the ones that have the most focus on this AI platform vision. And it was fun to sort of look at this. In the article, we look at some of the comments from the Q3 earnings call from ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott, and also from Palantir’s Chief Revenue Officer, Ryan Taylor.
