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 why Bill McDermott says ServiceNow is not a SaaS company and why SaaS is “on the menu.”
Highlights
00:03 — Welcome back to Cloud Wars Minute. The big thing is ServiceNow. As Bill McDermott says, ServiceNow is hungry and SaaS is on the menu. He went to great lengths in ServiceNow’s recent Q4 earnings call, and also in a follow-up interview with Jim Cramer of Mad Money, to say that ServiceNow is doing great. We hit and exceeded all our numbers. We are not a SaaS company now.
00:34 — One of the reasons McDermott wants to emphasize this separation from the SaaS community is because the SaaS business has been getting ravaged by Wall Street analysts who are thinking that AI, generative AI is going to completely gut the whole SaaS model. So they have knocked anywhere from 50, 60, 70% off the market caps of some leading SaaS companies.
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01:09 — He said AI, generative AI, and workflows and data are going to be the new model, the old model of traditional SaaS applications, or of what McDermott referred to repeatedly as features and functions. He said those are things of the past. We are the AI platform on which a lot of these SaaS apps will work and they’ll operate.
02:03 — Hyperscale is a nice name, but it doesn’t really describe all that they do. Some of them offer applications, application development. They all offer databases. You’ve now got SaaS companies that got caught up in just features and functions that don’t drive value and don’t get companies better prepared for the AI Economy. They’re all rolled together now.
03:05 — “Our stock price and our valuation have taken a huge hit because we are being misinterpreted as being part of the SaaS world.” We are not in the SaaS neighborhood. We are not a SaaS company. SaaS is on the menu. We’re hungry. AI and ServiceNow are going to eat a lot of these, devour a lot of these feature and function application companies.
