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 take a look at fiscal Q4 and full-year earnings from Workday, Snowflake, and Salesforce and analyze what they mean for the cloud business.
Highlights
00:16 — Three companies in the Cloud Wars Top 10 reported fiscal Q4 and full-year earnings last week. And one of the interesting things that came out across all three of those companies was a very, very strong report on their bookings or future orders: contracted business that’s not yet able to be recognized as revenue but is definitely future business.
00:59 — For Workday, what it calls its total subscription revenue backlog was up 27% to almost $21 billion. Snowflake, with what both Frank Slootman and CFO Mike Scarpelli called exceptionally strong bookings, was up 41% to $5.2 billion. And then, although it is the lowest of the growth rates for future bookings at Salesforce, what it’s calling its remaining performance obligation, was up 17% to $56 billion.
Ask Cloud Wars AI Agent about this analysis
02:19 — It isn’t just like there’s one category that’s doing really well, pulling everything else along. It’s three companies doing very different things: Workday in Financials and HCM applications; you’ve got Snowflake with the data cloud, and you’ve got Salesforce in CRM. There’s broad and deep potential across each of these categories.
03:32 — It represents in the minds of customers the acceptance of the complete fusion of cloud and AI for how those services are going to benefit customers as they move from their current positions into this AI-powered future.
04:33 — We’ll have lots more analyses of what these three companies. On top of that, we’ll have numbers from Oracle coming up within the next week or so.
