Cloud Wars Live with Bob Evans

In this special report, John Siefert, CEO, Dynamic Communities and Cloud Wars, speaks with Robbie Morrison about Velocio's acquisition of Domain Six and what the move means for customers, partners, and the broader Microsoft ecosystem. Morrison explains how the acquisition expands Velocio's enterprise capabilities, vertical-industry expertise, and delivery capacity while strengthening its ability to help organizations modernize around cloud, data, and AI.

Velocio Expands Expertise

The Big Themes:

Domain Six Expands Velocio's Reach: Velocio's acquisition of Domain Six represents more than a simple expansion of headcount. Robbie Morrison describes the acquisition as a strategic move that adds highly skilled consulting talent, enterprise delivery capabilities, and valuable intellectual property in specialized vertical markets. Domain Six brings expertise in areas such as rental businesses and professional services, allowing Velocio to broaden its market reach while deepening its industry-specific knowledge. Consulting is fundamentally a people-centric business, making the addition of experienced professionals especially valuable.

Customers Gain Access to Broader Expertise: One of the biggest benefits of the acquisition is the expanded access customers receive to specialized talent and services. Morrison notes that existing Velocio customers will gain access to Domain Six's industry expertise, while Domain Six customers will benefit from Velocio's larger global team and deeper Microsoft platform knowledge. The combined organization can now offer expertise spanning Azure, Dynamics, Microsoft 365, Fabric, data platforms, and business applications.

Governance Has Become a Competitive Advantage: Data governance is no longer just a security requirement. Morrison explains that governance, access controls, documentation, and process discipline have become business enablers. Proper governance ensures that the right employees can access the right information at the right time, allowing organizations to move faster and make better decisions. As AI systems increasingly depend on organizational data, governance frameworks become essential for both compliance and performance.

The Big Quote: “Everything that we do is people-centric. We're a consulting business at heart, and a consulting business is built on the knowledge and the abilities of the people you bring in, so bringing in that great team at Domain Six was key."

More from Velocio and Robbie Morrison:

Connect with Robbie on LinkedIn, read the press release about the Domain 6 acquisition,  or check out the Velocio website.

Visit Cloud Wars for more.

In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I look at how ServiceNow's AI strategy, open platform, and workflow data fabric are driving its next phase of growth.

Highlights

00:02 — ServiceNow is off to a hot start, not only with its quarterly results, but also in how CEO Bill McDermott is framing where the company is right now and, in terms of that, how that new position, which he says is, "We're 100% AI native," is going to allow them to pursue five what he called hyper-growth markets for quite some time.

01:06 — Who is AI native, and who is just sort of glossing over, applying some AI lipstick to their traditional solutions and technologies? The term that ServiceNow uses to refer to that latter category is AI sidecars, where they say that's just a little AI glomming onto traditional technology, and that's becoming less appealing to customers.

02:34 — Among the highlights he pointed out to support the strength of the company, he said, "We've got a $28 billion RPO, remaining performance obligation, that grew 23.5% in Q1." In addition to that, he said, "We've got the most open enterprise platform."

03:14 — First, its core ITSM business. He said with the complexity that's going on in enterprises and the more reliance on data that's going to be taking place here in the AI era, we're going to see a 50x —not 50%, 50x — boom in the number of tickets that are being sent through for IT support.

04:12 — He talked about what's going on there with Moveworks and the changes that ServiceNow has made to that, and how that's going to simplify things and help bring down the anxiety some people have about AI. And finally, he said, "Our workflow data fabric," which helps pull all the data together, is so essential for what's going on now with AI.

Visit Cloud Wars for more.

In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I discuss how Workday's Extend platform is helping developers build faster while maintaining governance and trust.

Highlights

00:03 — Earlier this week, Workday held its DevCon conference in Las Vegas. It was the biggest DevCon that Workday has ever had. They had 8,000 attendees, and of course, these days, the star of the show was new agentic capabilities that, in this case, Workday is pumping into its Workday Extend platform.

00:53 — This Developer Agent is being added to a number of new capabilities within the Extend platform, and I listened to this whole roundtable discussion, and a number of things jumped out. I just want to share some of the reactions with you because they give a sense of what's going on here among developers in the early stages of the AI revolution.

01:58 — One person called it a real game-changer, this Developer Agent, and she said, "What used to take me days, I can now do in about one hour." Another person said that, with Workday ensuring that all the guardrails around security, trust, and governance are there, "I can build now without losing any sleep every night."

03:08 — This person said actually hiring for software engineers here in the AI era is way up. I think what came across in this roundtable that Workday held at DevCon was the optimism that these folks showed. We're not only surviving the changes brought by AI, we're going to have chances to do more than we ever have before.

04:12 — Here they see that now the work, the time, the effort, the energy, the brain muscle that they are putting into their work is going to result in better output, more impact on the business, more capability, because the technology through these agents is both taking care of lower-level work and ensuring governance, trust, and security are wired in.

Check out this press release outlining the major introductions at DevCon.

Visit Cloud Wars for more.

In this episode of the AI Agent & Copilot Podcast, Giuseppe Ianni, podcast host and industry interviewer, is joined for a second time by Nandita Puri, PhD Researcher at Georgia Tech working at the intersection of bioinformatics and biochemistry. The conversation explores how AI is transforming drug discovery, accelerating hypothesis generation, reducing experimental costs, improving success rates, enabling rare disease research, and paving the way for virtual cell simulation.

Key Takeaways

AI Is Creating a New Drug Discovery Workflow: Puri describes a major transition from traditional laboratory-first research toward a hybrid approach combining computational and experimental science. Researchers can now use AI, machine learning, and pattern recognition to analyze massive biological datasets before conducting expensive laboratory work. According to Puri, "I see a healthy combination of 50% dry lab and wet-lab validation becoming the emerging standard." This shift allows scientists to move beyond manual analysis and leverage computational intelligence to generate stronger hypotheses, identify promising targets faster, and focus laboratory resources on the most promising opportunities.

Higher Success Rates Mean Lower Costs and Less Waste: One of the most immediate benefits of AI in drug discovery is improved experimental efficiency. Puri notes that individual experiments can cost "$10,000-$12,000" and historically have carried significant failure risk. By consolidating fragmented datasets and identifying meaningful biological signals, AI helps researchers prioritize stronger hypotheses before entering the laboratory. Puri explained that some AI-assisted binder-development efforts achieved "40% 50% of success rate," compared with previous rates of "10% 5%." These improvements reduce wasted resources, shorten research timelines, and allow scientific teams to evaluate more potential treatments with the same budget.

AI Is Unlocking Opportunities for Rare Disease Research: Rare diseases have historically faced funding and development challenges due to limited patient populations and expensive clinical validation requirements. Puri explains that AI is helping overcome these barriers by generating synthetic datasets, identifying hidden biological relationships, and revealing common signaling pathways between diseases. She notes that "AI is really, really helping rare disease industry to go forward."

Visit Cloud Wars for more.

In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I explore why OpenAI could soon rank among the world's biggest enterprise software companies.

Highlights

00:03 — Early this year, OpenAI joined the Cloud Wars Top 10 in the number 10 spot. Because of the impact OpenAI has had, moving from the ChatGPT explosion three and a half years ago up to now, and their move very aggressively into the enterprise, they are a player of a major type with huge potential, both in what they're doing themselves and the partnerships they have.

01:07 — The biggest one turns out to be that right now the enterprise part of the OpenAI business is very soon going to be the biggest, and I think it is currently the fastest-growing part of OpenAI. Denise Dresser [Chief Revenue Officer, OpenAI] said that enterprise revenue at OpenAI is now 40% of total revenue, and by the end of this year it'll be 50%.

02:05 — OpenAI Enterprise has two million enterprise customers right now. A year ago, she said it was one million. They're not all giant companies and they're not all paying OpenAI a lot of money, but what they're doing is seeding the way for future opportunities and growth. OpenAI hinted that they're on about a $25 billion run rate.

03:04 — If OpenAI grows 60% this year, making that $25 billion run rate $40 billion, then 50% of that going to enterprise would be a $20 billion business at a fairly conservative guess. It could be closer to $25 billion, making them a bigger, faster-growing enterprise AI software player than Workday, Palantir, and ServiceNow.

04:33 — Customers see that there's a lot of potential in the technology that OpenAI has, but they also want to know if OpenAI has the capability to support it. Dresser said that by the end of this year, OpenAI plans to have 300,000 trained consultants for the OpenAI Enterprise business. Competition is great. It's going to make everybody better.

Visit Cloud Wars for more.