Business transformations, AI agents, new customer-engagement models, GenAI innovations, process optimizations, new business models, and the renewed power of partnerships have all come together to make 2024 one of the most tumultuous but also promising years I can recall.
As I discussed yesterday in Part 1 of my 2-part series on Who Will Be the CEO of the Year for 2024, the leaders of the Cloud Wars Top 10 companies are playing outsized roles in this global revolution that’s reshaping not only the business world but many parts of our personal lives as well:
So when I make my annual selection of the CEO of the Year, my objective goes well beyond who earned the most money or who blew away revenue expectations or pulled off the biggest acquisition — although each of those achievements is certainly fine in its own right.
Rather, the Cloud Wars CEO of the Year represents a leader whose vision for what the world could be like inspires other leaders to think less about perfecting the past and more about creating the future; who believes that technology’s true potential is to turn human dreams into reality; and whose aspirations help all of us blur the line between what was forever impossible but is now becoming wholly possible.
Today, I’ll be offering some thoughts on the performances throughout 2024 of five of the Cloud Wars Top 10 CEOs. Listed alphabetically by company name, I’ll share below some top-line impressions of Salesforce’s Marc Benioff, SAP’s Christian Klein (the Cloud Wars CEO of the Year for 2023), ServiceNow’s Bill McDermott, Snowflake’s Sridhar Ramaswamy, and Workday’s Carl Eschenbach.
Those perspectives follow the five I shared yesterday for (again alphabetically) AWS’s Matt Garman, Google Cloud’s Thomas Kurian, IBM’s Arvind Krishna, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, and Oracle’s Safra Catz.
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1. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. For 25 years, Marc Benioff has been a passionate and highly visible champion for the cloud, for the power of data, and more recently for AI. And throughout 2024, Benioff has been remaking his company — still the world’s largest vendor of enterprise apps and related solutions, although SAP is getting very close to overtaking it — around the dynamic new field of agents, the latest high-potential progeny of the AI Revolution. While every company in the Cloud Wars Top 10 has been bullish on the potential of agents, no one has come close to matching Benioff’s ultra-bullish projections for the role they’ll play in augmenting humans in the emergent world of AI-powered business. At the same time, Benioff has had to overhaul his company’s culture, cost structure, and even some of its aspirations as he’s fine-tuned his new approach of making margins and profits — rather than growth — his top priority. Last quarter, Salesforce posted growth of just 8%, dipping into single-digit growth for the first time in the company’s illustrious history. Can Benioff make that a winning strategy in the Cloud Wars?
2. SAP CEO Christian Klein. Making a strong case to win back-to-back Cloud Wars CEO of the Year awards, 2023 winner Christian Klein has firmly established his company as the fastest-growing enterprise-applications company by far. With cloud-revenue growth rates throughout 2024 in the range of 25%, SAP is growing twice as fast as Oracle in cloud apps and three times as fast as Salesforce. And while Salesforce and Workday have each said enterprise customers are pulling back on big investments in apps, SAP has rolled right along under Klein’s bullish leadership. In the wild new world of agents, Klein is forging a distinct path for SAP by fusing a new portfolio of agents with SAP’s year-old Joule AI copilot, creating a fleet of superagents that will be both autonomous and collaborative. At the same time, Klein has successfully defended SAP’s massive installed base of on-prem installed customers from intense efforts to pull them away by Oracle, Workday, and Salesforce — and if the move by those on-prem customers meets the expectations Klein and his team have shared, then Klein can be sure that SAP will maintain its dominant position as the world’s fastest-growing enterprise-apps vendor.
3. ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott. An early driver of the AI Revolution, McDermott has positioned his high-flying company in 2024 to be a major force across the Cloud Wars in a few areas:
- he’s transformed ServiceNow from a terrific but highly niched supplier to IT teams to a full-suite provider of workflows that can peacefully and productively co-exist with what customers already have;
- he’s complementing those workflow solutions with a first wave of agents that enhance what ServiceNow is already doing while also kicking open the door for new opportunities;
- he’s managed to keep ServiceNow friends with many and foes of few, although the sheer potential of the workflow market will not let that isolation last for long; and
- he’s created a strong belief in the future of ServiceNow that’s reflected in a market cap of $195 billion on an annualized revenue run rate of about $11 billion — and if anyone wants evidence of belief in a company’s future, that is it.
One more thing: he’s positioned ServiceNow as the AI platform for business transformation — not a bad spot to be in, is it?
4. Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy. Following in the footsteps of giants is never easy, but that’s the hand that was dealt to Sridhar Ramaswamy eight months ago when industry legend Frank Slootman stepped down as Snowflake CEO and the board appointed Ramaswamy to take Slootman’s place. The market reaction was swift and brutal and has been relentless: A few days before Slootman announced his plans to step down, Snowflake’s market cap was $75 billion, and within a day or two it fell to about $50 billion. Early last month, it was as low as $36 billion. But right now the only two things that Ramaswamy — who was without question Slootman’s hand-picked successor, and for that deserves to be given a lot of credibility — can do are (1) keep building new data and app-dev and AI products faster than ever before and (2) ensuring that customers are convinced that Snowflake is making the rapid leap from the Data Cloud to the AI Data Cloud. And while he’s at that, he needs to keep Snowflake’s growth rate at 30% or higher, or the much larger Cloud Wars Top 10 companies will begin gouging share that Ramaswamy can’t afford to miss.
5. Workday CEO Carl Eschenbach. After a wildly successful career as COO of VMware during its highest-growth days and then as a VC legend with Sequoia, Carl Eschenbach has established himself as the commercial-market revenue dynamo that Workday needs as it competes against much larger and equally voracious competitors. On top of maintaining Workday’s traditional growth rates of about 18% even as the company gets bigger, Eschenbach made a huge move a few months ago by aligning with Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff — a longtime friend to and partner of Workday — on the most-ambitious partnership the companies have ever had. In essence, it’s a complete multi-cloud partnership that allows users of Workday apps and Salesforce apps to move across the two companies’ apps more easily and to work with data from across all those apps. It’s an essential move for Workday, and Eschenbach must demonstrate that he can leverage that bold strategic move at the vendor-to-vendor level into superb business outcomes for Workday customers and for Salesforce customers. And if Eschenbach’s history can be used as a guide, that’s a challenge he will eagerly accept.
Final Thought
Okay, so there you’ve got my thoughts on the CEOs of Salesforce, SAP, ServiceNow, Snowflake, and Workday in the context of the Cloud Wars CEO of the Year 2024, and yesterday I shared the same for the CEOs of AWS, Google Cloud, IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle.
Let me know what you think on LinkedIn at or via email at bob@accelerationeconomy.com. Thanks!
