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 take a look at how SAP and Salesforce are racing into a new phase of competition.
Highlights
00:30 — At this critical time, we see that in the SAP-Salesforce rivalry, the battleground has shifted away from just straight applications. Applications do remain very important, but the biggest front on which these companies are going to compete now is about data, clouds, and agentic AI.
01:02 — I think this represents one of the eternal truths within the Cloud Wars, and that is this basic notion: what got you here will not take you there. Applications are continuing to be extremely important, but they’re not enough. What they need to do now to be able to deliver what’s needed in the AI era is to be reinvigorated with agentic AI.
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02:06 — So, both of these companies now are now saying data is the prime issue here. As we’ve all heard and said many times, you cannot have a successful AI strategy without a successful data strategy. You can’t have successful AI initiatives without a clean house regarding data before you set off on that. Data clouds have become very important for both of them.
03:27 — We had data warehouses. Then came this thing called data lakes. Then we had to put those together, and you had a data lakehouse. And then I think we might have a data riverfront cottage, and then a data seaside manor. You know, the names start to get silly. I think customers will feel a lot more comfortable with the notion of something like a data cloud.
04:04 — So, they’re both very bullish on this notion of apps and agents. But they see this new role for applications isn’t so much the end goal, the only thing that customers want. These apps powered by agents are going to fuel the data clouds and fuel new AI initiatives. A very different future that both Salesforce and SAP are coming toward.
