Acceleration Economy is expanding editorial coverage in the Cloud Wars channel beyond the current Cloud Wars Top 10 companies to include a new set of high-growth companies that are helping their customers drive outstanding business results.
Our coverage will focus on companies – which we’re collectively referring to as Cloud Wars Horizon — that are dazzling customers by helping them grow their business and solve problems through a combination of leading-edge software, services, co-creation, and partnerships that put customers’ needs first.
Acceleration Economy co-founder and Cloud Wars founder Bob Evans has been ranking the Cloud Wars Top 10 for six years. Consistent with that analysis, our coverage will emphasize how technology supports and accelerates core business goals. Cloud technology is critically important in that equation, but it’s the business outcomes that we’ll primarily emphasize, and we’ll chronicle vendors doing the best job of delivering those outcomes for their customers.
We’ll place sharp focus on themes that drive Top 10 coverage: vertical-industry clouds and how companies that are using them to accelerate business, sustainability from a real-world, profit-and-loss perspective, digital transformation, customer-centricity, partner ecosystems, supply chains, trends in cloud usage, and more.
As Bob noted when he first introduced the Cloud Wars Top 10, companies make the list by aligning their cloud technology to the rapidly evolving needs of customers:
“Because as great as the technology is, buying decisions today are being made by business executives who have little or no interest in arcane, deep-tech discussions and are instead solely focused on picking the best solution for linking global supply chains with demand chains, closing financial books in days instead of weeks, finding and hiring superb people, and transforming how business is done from what’s convenient for the seller to what’s most appealing to the buyer.”
Bob Evans on the Cloud Wars Top 10
The ranking, however, features some unconventional – or you might say, contrarian – thinking. The longstanding No. 1 cloud vendor is Microsoft, not Amazon AWS (Bob Evans’ initial designation of the No. 1 vendor noted that Microsoft delivers “hyperscale innovation”) and our list includes Snowflake, which makes the list ahead of some larger and better-known cloud players. The hyperscalers in the Top 10 are critically important to their customers, the tech industry, and the global economy.
So why are we expanding the focus to go deeper than the Top 10? There’s amazing work going on in the next tier of companies: dazzling customers and employees, technical innovation, application of automation to tangible business problems, and more. We want to spotlight that work while presenting great technology, and innovative customer use of technology, in front of our audience.
In just one week of talking to prospective Cloud Wars Horizon companies and their customers, it’s clear that there’s a massive amount of opportunity to uncover innovative technology being applied to the most pressing business problems.
In addition to the criteria detailed above, we’re selecting companies for Cloud Wars Horizon coverage because we think they have the potential to break into the Cloud Wars Top 10; our coverage will explain why we think that’s the case. In some cases, these will be companies you recognize, but they’re not typically as big as Microsoft, Amazon, Google Cloud and the other Top 10 companies. We expect to uncover some hidden gems as well.
The list of companies that we will cover is a work in progress. We’ve identified the first group but we are open to your ideas, suggestions, and even pitches.
You will see the first Cloud Wars Horizon coverage beginning next week, and we welcome your feedback about who we cover and why. We look forward to healthy debate on which companies are doing the most for their customers with cloud technology.
If you think your company should be part of Cloud Wars Horizon coverage, please fill out this form for consideration or shoot me a message and I’d be happy to have a conversation. In your submission, I encourage you to emphasize specific ways your company is working with customers to help them accelerate growth and stay out in front of competitors. Customer proof points will always strengthen the case for covering a company.
Stay tuned for a steady stream of coverage in the weeks and months ahead. I look forward to engaging with this audience as we highlight those companies that are on the Cloud Wars Horizon. This should be quite a ride as we feature more of the companies that are driving the greatest growth market the world has ever known.
For additional insights on Cloud Wars Horizon, check out our video introduction in the Cloud Wars Horizon Minute.
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