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 explore how the top 10 cloud providers have amassed nearly $1 trillion in remaining performance obligations.
Highlights
00:15 — One of the things I’ve been paying a lot more attention to over the last year and a half or so with the Cloud Wars Top 10 companies is their RPO (remaining performance obligation). We’ve now got the Cloud Wars Top 10 with a combined RPO of $1 trillion — well, $978 billion. But I hope you’ll forgive me if I round up.
00:56 — Microsoft’s RPO number is $315 billion. AWS, $189 billion. Oracle, $138 billion. Then you’ve got Google, $90 billion. SAP, $68.4 billion. IBM, $63 billion. Salesforce, $60.9 billion. Workday, $24.6 billion. ServiceNow, $22.3 billion. And Snowflake, $6.7 billion. As I said, all adds up to a total of $978 billion.
02:35 — The cloud and AI are inseparable these days. The demand for these sorts of products is so high that, in spite of some of these anxieties (geopolitical unrest, some difficult economic climates in some places). Business leaders, in spite of all that, are investing very heavily in the cloud and AI, and we see that reflected in these numbers.
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03:03 — I also want to point out that at least, if not all, of these companies that give their RPO figures talk about the growth of those RPO figures. These, I think, are all indications of what we’re seeing with the cloud: the opportunities, the capabilities that it is giving to businesses and other large organizations to be able to fully exploit the power of AI.
04:17 — The acceleration that’s going to happen as all of these technology tools come in and allow people to dig deeper and better, to get more valuable insights more quickly, these are all going to come to the forefront. What those big numbers represent is incredible confidence on the part of business leaders in where the future of this cloud and AI revolution is headed.
