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.
This episode is sponsored by Acceleration Economy’s “Cloud Wars Top 10 Course,” which explains how Bob Evans builds and updates the Cloud Wars Top 10 ranking, as well as how C-suite executives use the list to inform strategic cloud purchase decisions. The course is available today.
In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I share some new ways to group the top ten cloud companies.
Highlights
00:26 —The three hottest vendors are number one, Oracle; number two, Google; and number three ServiceNow. I’ve broken the top ten into four separate categories. The Overachievers; the One and Only; Strong and Steady; and Plodding and Perhaps Fading.
01:15 — Number two, the One and Only, that’s Microsoft. Its growth rate of 21% was not nearly as high as the three on top. But on the other hand, I really think we’ve got to make a special case for Microsoft, its volume is just astonishing: $30.3 billion in cloud revenue in the last quarter. That is so far ahead of anybody else.
02:32 —The Overachievers: Oracle at 30%, Google Cloud at 28%, and ServiceNow at 25% revenue growth. The Strong and Steady include SAP and Workday. Their growth rates are similar, but SAP’s cloud revenue is more than twice as large as that of Workdays’. Then in my Plotting and Perhaps Fading category are three companies: AWS, Salesforce, and IBM.
03:34 — AWS has been on a slow downward spiral, quarter after quarter after quarter. I want to be very clear that its revenue for the quarter ended June 30, was $22.1 billion. It’s an enormous company, but in the Cloud Wars, historically, that sort of 12% growth rate is just not something that really stands out.
04:34 — In the case of Salesforce, it’s very similar. Eleven percent growth rate on $8.6 billion in revenue, so credit for sustaining that base. But 11% revenue in this market means that faster, moving nimbler, more innovative competitors are chewing away at market share.
05:00 — IBM has stopped in their quarterly results offering any sort of detail about their cloud performance, so I have nothing more to say about IBM. The one company I didn’t mention that I had plugged into the Overachievers is Snowflake. Its growth rate was 37%, but I set them off to the side and didn’t rank them with the others on this growth chart. When Snowflake hits a billion dollars in quarterly revenue, it’ll be mainstreamed with the others.
