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 today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I dive into how Salesforce and ServiceNow are making bold moves into each other’s core business areas.
Highlights
00:15 — Fascinating to see some big changes sweeping across the software side of the Cloud Wars Top 10, and in this case, we see both Salesforce and ServiceNow capitalizing on some of those big changes, and AI agents are at the heart of this. Different needs from customers are at the center of it as well.
00:54 — So for ServiceNow, CRM is, according to Bill McDermott, “already our fastest-growing business.” On the Salesforce side, Mark Benioff, in the company’s fiscal Q4 earnings call said, “Yeah, and if you look hard, you might even be able to see our new ITSM product.” ITSM (IT Service Management) was the initial product category that ServiceNow got into business with when McDermott joined.
02:17 — Five or six years ago, that’s when McDermott really pushed ServiceNow into things like CRM for customer-developed applications, developer tools, security, and customer service. So, it’s been a rapid, high-growth expansion for CRM. You could say this is a natural extension of what it’s doing. I think, in the case of Salesforce going after IT Service Management, that’s a little bit more of a head-scratcher.
03:20 — I think what we’re seeing, in the larger sense, is this: the entire software industry is using this sort of break from tradition, this transformative moment in the software industry’s history to say, “Hey, while I’m doing this, I just might go jump into some new markets because there’s new capabilities.”
04:24 — There’s probably some personal stuff here between Benioff and McDermott. But it’s very interesting to see. And I think what we will find out from this latest sort of head-banging, after a few years of more saber-rattling between the two companies, I think the real head-to-head stuff is coming.
