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 this episode of the Cloud Wars Minute, I review a big idea that ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott put forward at the Knowledge 25 global customer event last week.
Highlights
00:20 — During Knowledge 25, McDermott noted that we are about to witness the “collapse of the 20th century software industrial complex.” By this, he likely meant the use by many big companies of applications that are 15 to 25 years old that aren’t able to keep up with the demands of modern business.
00:55 — In his keynote at Knowledge 25, McDermott channeled in the words from December of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, talking about how the applications business will collapse and be swamped by agents that will relegate modern enterprise applications to the role of what Nadella called a CRUD database. CRUD covers four actions which don’t seem very interesting, so this certainly isn’t a compliment.
02:10 Typically, we look to the CEOs of the Cloud Wars Top 10 to give us an idea of what’s coming. However, it seems like the words of both Nadella and McDermott about this are leaning toward this tech becoming irrelevant.
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03:00 The notion of apps disappearing and it’s going to be agents all the time — I’m not so sure about that. The upshot of that is a near wipeout of the enterprise applications business.
03:18 It might be easy for executives of these organizations to forecast the obsolescence of the applications business, as they are doing more around platforms and specific solutions. Executives of organizations that heavily invested in a big business transformation on new applications might have a different perspective and don’t see this giant collapse.
04:10 These other businesses are saying that without the inclusion and infusion of agentic AI, the applications won’t be able to keep up. On this specifically, McDermott commented that in the era of agentic AI, a traditional application stack will collapse. The number of apps that customers use will be greatly reduced, and traditional applications will become databases.
