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, the focus is on Salesforce’s impressive Q4 performance.
Highlights
00:15 — Salesforce reported some impressive Q4 numbers last week. It really comes down to its RPO — that’s remaining performance obligation. So I’m referring to these results overall as the big impact from its Agentforce AI business. This future contracted business rose much faster than their reported revenue. So its RPO for Q4 was up 11% to $63.4 billion.
01:14 — New products — Agentforce, Data Cloud, and some of the other AI offerings — are factoring into a higher growth trajectory into the future, customer demand clearly being strong. If you look at Q3, the RPO was 10% at $53.1 billion. So a better growth rate, from 10% to 11% in Q4, and a big jump to $10 billion in RPO total.
02:12 — Data Cloud and AI offerings were included in every one of the 10 biggest deals that Salesforce posted for the quarter, and in Q4, Salesforce posted its first-ever $10 billion quarter. It came in at exactly $10 billion. And for its guidance for the coming full year, which will run from February 1 to January 31, it’s expecting close to $41 billion in revenue.
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03:27 — Last week, Salesforce and Google Cloud signed a big deal. Salesforce is looking to bring more cutting-edge, modern, powerful, data-oriented technologies into the ecosystem that are available to Salesforce and its customers. Now, we’ve seen different companies take different approaches to the relationship between applications and AI agents.
04:33 — Over at Oracle, executive vice president Steve Miranda says no, no — applications are going to be enhanced by AI agents, which will become part of the applications, and that applications will still be the stars going forward. Marc Benioff says the combination of Data Cloud, AI agents, and Salesforce applications is fused together. He calls it a single set of code.
