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 discuss how shifting customer demands in the AI era are pushing tech giants like Snowflake and SAP into more flexible, dynamic partnerships.
Highlights
00:53— Snowflake EVP Christian Kleinerman was asked: “Hey, we see that one of your competitors, Databricks, just forged this very close partnership with SAP. Do you see something like that looming for Snowflake?” Kleinerman said, “We really like what SAP is doing with the Business Data Cloud, and we hope to share more with you soon.”
01:35 — So this is a non-news thing, but the interesting part behind here is the trend, what I am calling now the age of promiscuous partnerships. There are so many new opportunities, requirements, needs, and desires on the part of business customers here in the AI revolution that it’s requiring the vendors that are serving them to rethink how they’re doing partnerships.
02:09 — If, in the past, a tech vendor might say, “I’ve got one partner I’m going to use for this, and then over here in a different area, I’ll go with one exclusive partner,” I think now we’re seeing that, especially within the Cloud Wars Top 10, these companies are finding fantastic new customer-oriented reasons to pair up and forge partnerships.
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02:43 — Now, coming back to this thing with Snowflake and Databricks both desiring close partnerships with SAP — SAP systems run vast chunks of the global economy. It is an incredible set of data. SAP joined up with Databricks for some of this very precise, modern, and complex forward-looking data engineering that’s needed to feed into AI systems and solutions
03:27 — That led to the Databricks partnership. Now, Snowflake, with its own AI Data Cloud, wants in on some of that. So Snowflake, which originally came up with the idea of a data cloud, now wants to join forces with the SAP Business Data Cloud to collaborate.
04:18 — “Promiscuous” means that we shouldn’t take the limits imposed by traditional ways of doing partnerships. Look at what happened last year. Oracle Database is now available on Microsoft Azure Cloud, Google Cloud, and AWS. Who would have thought that possible? Yet, here they all are.
