Welcome to the Cloud Wars Minute — your daily news and commentary show, hosted by Cloud Wars Founder, Bob Evans. The next three minutes are packed with insights and perspectives around the “reimagination machine” that is the Cloud! Today’s Topic: The Coming Workflow Rumble Between Salesforce, Slack, and ServiceNow.
Highlights
00:18 – Since Bill McDermott took over as CEO about two years ago, ServiceNow has been the unquestioned king of the “digital workflow.” No major cloud vendor has challenged the company in this area, and ServiceNow has grown rapidly and raised its revenue expectations over time.
00:50 – Into this wide-open field, it seems, Salesforce under Marc Benioff is preparing to mount an attack. And recent acquisition Slack may be Salesforce’s weapon of choice to go after ServiceNow in workflows.
01:25 – On Salesforce’s recent Q3 earnings call, co-CEOs Marc Benioff and Bret Taylor gushed about Slack. They said that in the 30 days since Salesforce has been using the platform, the company has reduced its email volume by 44%. This is the kind of transformative change they’re looking to bring to customers: a revolution in “workflows and automation.”
02:00 – Another factor to consider is that Marc Benioff has set hugely ambitious goals for Salesforce. Slack promises to be another source of revenue for the company as it seeks to hit the $40-billion mark in a short number of years.
02:29 – This represents another step in the ongoing transformation of Salesforce. The company says that it remains focused on CRM, but that can only be true if we accept that they’re drastically expanding what we mean when we say “CRM.” Across the cloud industry, what companies did a few years ago does not limit what they can do today and into the future.
03:00 – A recent report from Deloitte noted that industry clouds could account for $640 billion in the cloud.
