Not so long after the self-proclaimed experts were confidently forecasting the imminent demise of “legacy” tech companies, the world’s three top 50-something cloud and AI vendors have gutted that foolish perspective as the Cloud Wars Top 10 shows Oracle at #2, Microsoft at #3, and SAP at #4.
With a combined market cap of $4.75 trillion, those three graybeards — Oracle’s 49 years young, Microsoft’s 51, and SAP’s 54 — have obliterated the goofy argument that they were headed for the tarpits in spite of their incredibly valuable real-world experiences and expertise, and their massive sets of trusted relationships, and their deep knowledge of the on-premises technologies that still run vast swaths of the global economy.
The know-it-alls also prophesied that the oblivion-or-bust old-timers would be thoroughly overrun and totally outgunned by the new cloud-native generation because its players were so much cooler, hipper, and flat-out better than the faded fuddy-duddies.
There’s a lesson in there for all of us, and it is this: the zero-sum model mandating that if a new thing comes along and is successful, then everything else has to consequently fail — rarely works in the world of enterprise-tech — this isn’t some winner-take-all consumer market where pink sneakers are all the rage on Monday but totally out of fashion by Friday.
So, as the cloud became the dominant model for enterprise technology, the boomer crowd led by Oracle, Microsoft, and SAP defied the predictions of imminent doom spewing forth from trendy experts and instead adapted rapidly and wholeheartedly while straddling the on-premises world on which most of their customers depended while transforming for the new world of the cloud to which all of their customers aspired.
Did those transformations happen as rapidly as some of the know-it-alls would have liked? Certainly not — but they certainly did evolve at the pace that allowed their customers to transform not only their technology estates but also, and more importantly, their business strategies, operations, and outlooks.
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All Three Near Top of Fastest-Growing Major Cloud and AI Vendors
The Cloud Wars Growth Chart below was published on Dec. 16 and shows that the 50-somethings are thriving in the very early days of the AI Economy, handily outpacing the growth rates of cloud natives ServiceNow, AWS, Workday, and Salesforce.
With AI, the Old-Timers Will Be Even More Successful
While there’s plenty of opportunity for everyone here in the greatest growth market the world has ever known, I believe the “legacy” trio will be able to leverage their cloud success even more aggressively for the AI Economy because the two technologies are so intertwined and interrelated.
That provides the foundation for Oracle, Microsoft, and SAP to then exploit their formidable strengths in every:
- type of technology from mainframes to TPUs;
- industry from financial services to construction;
- subset of ecosystem partners from global SIs to boutique data shops; and
- functional area and LOB from the CFO to martech to logistics and beyond.
Final Thought
Market success certainly comes with consequences, and here in the Cloud Wars the vendors that best enable their customers for future success are reaping great rewards. But, it’s a far cry from there to the sterile world of the zero-sum game, which presumes a fixed and finite TAM, which imposes a mindset predicated on limits and scarcity.
But Oracle, Microsoft, and SAP continue to thrive and grow and dazzle their customers because their mindset is centered on abundance, not scarcity; and on helping customers build for an extraordinary future instead of fighting to the death over the scraps of the past.
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