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.
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In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I look at the leading cloud CEOs and the innovative strategies they are implementing to drive growth in the tech industry.
Highlights
00:22 — Today, in Part 2 of the “Who will be the CEO of the Year in the Cloud Wars” series, I’ve got five new names and the cases to be made for them. And those are Marc Benioff, Christian Klein, Bill McDermott, Sridhar Ramaswamy, and Carl Eschenbach. The other possibility is it could be some of the ones we mentioned yesterday, the first five. Now about these five.
01:43 — Marc Benioff for 25 years has been an extraordinary leader. I think Benioff currently is hitting on what he thinks is going to be the next wave of growth for Salesforce, and that’s around agents and what Salesforce is calling Agent Force. He believes that agents are going to be the next big thing, and he wants to position Salesforce out in front of that.
02:34 — Over at SAP, Christian Klein was our CEO of the Year for 2023. In 2024, what Klein has done is push SAP to the point now where it is by far the fastest-growing enterprise applications company in the world. That’s been a great ,chievement. SAP’s attempting to put a different spin on the whole agent story. SAP has become a force.
03:42 — ServiceNow’s Bill McDermott has done remarkable things. He has taken ServiceNow from being mostly a very niche but very successful player in the IT operations and service space. Now it’s full suite end-to-end across the enterprise with their workflow apps. Their agents that are kicking in here now as well are going to play beautifully into ServiceNow’s workflow position.
04:20 — At Snowflake, Sridhar Ramaswamy has had his hands full in the eight months that he’s been CEO. The problem is he followed a legend in Frank Slootman. Ramaswamy was the handpicked successor by Slootman. Very quickly here, the big Cloud Wars Top 10 companies are starting to zero in on the data cloud idea, the AI data cloud, and so forth.
05:10 — At Workday, Carl Eschenbach has brought a new sense of energy to the company. He’s kept the revenue growth up about 18% even as the company has gotten bigger. The biggest thing Eschenbach has done this year is that Salesforce applications users and Workday can work across those apps and work with the data that comes out of those applications. That’s very forward-looking.
06:00 — One of these ten will be the Cloud Wars CEO of the Year for 2024. We’ll pick that in December.
