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 explore how tech rivals are becoming collaborators to better serve customer innovation.
Highlights
00:43 — I call SAP and Snowflake’s recent announcement a promiscuous partnership that’s powerful and promising. I’ll try not to trip over too many more P’s here, but I think the point of this is we’re seeing the promiscuous side: big tech companies that, you know, were very selective about how they worked with each other in the past.
01:04 — I think now we’re seeing that there are great advantages toward them aligning in ways — working together to do things for customers that neither could do individually. I think the ultimate example of this is the Oracle multicloud deals with Microsoft, Google Cloud, and AWS. So, in this case here, now we see both SAP and Snowflake are in the data cloud space.
AI Agent & Copilot Summit is an AI-first event to define opportunities, impact, and outcomes with Microsoft Copilot and agents. Building on its 2025 success, the 2026 event takes place March 17-19 in San Diego. Get more details.
02:04 — This could have been a situation where SAP and Snowflake might have said: “I have a Data Cloud. You have one. We’re going to compete” — but the result would be — “We’re going to make customers’ lives more miserable, because to work with both the SAP Data Cloud and the Snowflake Data Cloud, those customers are going to have to find workarounds and ways to integrate and all that.” Instead, they said, “Let’s try to do this together.”
03:00 — Some highlights: it accelerates customer innovation because they can spend more time focusing on business innovation, growth, and new business models, rather than a lot of expense on integration. The two companies, Snowflake and SAP, have intertwined their brands, which I think reveals to customers a very powerful commitment. This solution is called SAP Snowflake.
03:55 — The AI revolution has put all sorts of new and interesting, challenging stresses on customers, right? And on the Cloud Wars Top 10 vendors: it can’t just be business as usual for customers. The tech vendors have to operate differently — not just in the products they create but in the alliances they strike.
04:46 — I tip my hat to Snowflake and SAP, and I think we’re going to be seeing lots more of these promiscuous partnerships break out as the needs of the AI Revolution require customers to do things differently — which, in turn, compels the Cloud Wars Top 10 companies to behave in different ways.
