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 explore the performances of the Cloud Wars Top 10 CEOs over the past year.
Highlights
01:12 — Last week, we named SAP’s Christian Klein the Cloud Wars CEO of the Year. In that same spirit, I also just wanted to touch on some of my thoughts for each of the Cloud Wars Top 10 CEOs. Early in January, we’ll have our traditional series called CEO Outlook 2024.
02:22 — First, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella. Nadella has done a masterful job of driving the company to the forefront of the generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) Revolution. One of the truly transformative moves made by Nadella in 2023 was an extended partnership around multi-cloud with Oracle and its chairman and founder Larry Ellison.
03:27 — Number two is Google Cloud’s Thomas Kurian. He has done an extraordinary job over the last four years of turning Google Cloud from a company that was like a big technology laboratory. It is aggressively moving into all the new areas of AI, GenAI, cybersecurity, and other things.
04:10 — Now AWS: there’s some challenges here. When Adam Selipsky took over as CEO of AWS, just over two and a half years ago, the company’s growth rate was 40%. In the 10 or 11 quarters since then, that growth rate has gone down precipitously every quarter.
04:45 — Number four, Oracle’s Safra Catz was the Cloud Wars CEO of the Year last year for 2022. She has done a superb job, keeping Oracle in the number one spot on our fastest-growing companies and changing the culture of the company totally to being about customer success and the cloud.
05:08 —We’ve mentioned Klein. We’ve got the full-length interview that I did with Klein, a long article about that, and also a terrific special report that pulls in lots of additional insightful material about SAP and Klein.
05:22 — Sixth spot, we’ve got ServiceNow’s Bill McDermott. He’s been continuing to move this company that was in a very niche IT service management position. Now they’ve got that across multiple functional areas.
06:05 — In his first year, Carl Eschenbach energized Workday and made it more aggressive on the sales and go-to-market side. Salesforce‘s Marc Benioff: I’m calling his current position a very precarious, challenging balancing act. He wants to keep going for higher and higher profits, but also be able to compete with the high-growth competitors that he’s surrounded with.
06:27 — IBM‘s Arvind Krishna has been transformative. He’s done a great job cleaning up a real mess that he inherited from Ginni Rometty. In my analysis later today, I’ll talk more about that. And Frank Slootman, CEO of Snowflake, is both a visionary and doing a brilliant job at execution.
