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.
AI Copilot Summit NA is an AI-first event to define the opportunities, impact, and outcomes possible with Microsoft Copilot for mid-market & enterprise companies. Register now to attend AI Copilot Summit in San Diego, CA from March 17-19, 2025.
In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I examine ServiceNow’s potential to collaborate or compete with giants like Salesforce and Microsoft.
Highlights
00:31 — Bill McDermott is steering ServiceNow to having an end-to-end suite of workflows — built on the ServiceNow platform. In parallel, the big applications vendors are building out end-to-end suites. Will ServiceNow form partnerships with SAP, Oracle, Workday, Salesforce, and Microsoft? Or will those companies choose to get into the workflow business?
01:16 — ServiceNow is doing extremely well. I think the apps vendors are going to go into this workflow business through their AI-powered applications. The agent wars breaking out and all the big apps vendors getting into that is going to intersect with the whole notion of workflows that ServiceNow has pioneered.
02:12 — On the other hand, if it can recruit some of these companies, particularly Oracle and SAP, to form partnerships, then ServiceNow’s promise of saying, “Hey, we’re not asking you to displace anything. We can work with the incumbent vendors and applications and data sets you already have”— that could be an even bigger win.
03:21 — So, quietly and without going directly head-to-head with the big apps vendors, ServiceNow is becoming a player in all of the traditional IT application spaces through this workflow connection. ServiceNow is also infusing GenAI into the flow of work on an end-to-end basis across the enterprise. So, ServiceNow isn’t a niche player as it had been prior to McDermott.
04:39 — McDermott’s big point about this, he said, is that for ServiceNow to win, nobody else has to lose. So, it’ll be interesting to see if he’s able to form some partnerships that span these workflow and applications parallel tracks that some of these companies are on. Or, if it becomes head-on competition.
