Cloud Wars Live with Bob Evans

In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I explore why Bill McDermott says ServiceNow is not a SaaS company and why SaaS is “on the menu.”
Highlights
00:03 — Welcome back to Cloud Wars Minute. The big thing is ServiceNow. As Bill McDermott says, ServiceNow is hungry and SaaS is on the menu. He went to great lengths in ServiceNow's recent Q4 earnings call, and also in a follow-up interview with Jim Cramer of Mad Money, to say that ServiceNow is doing great. We hit and exceeded all our numbers. We are not a SaaS company now.
00:34 — One of the reasons McDermott wants to emphasize this separation from the SaaS community is because the SaaS business has been getting ravaged by Wall Street analysts who are thinking that AI, generative AI is going to completely gut the whole SaaS model. So they have knocked anywhere from 50, 60, 70% off the market caps of some leading SaaS companies.
01:09 — He said AI, generative AI, and workflows and data are going to be the new model, the old model of traditional SaaS applications, or of what McDermott referred to repeatedly as features and functions. He said those are things of the past. We are the AI platform on which a lot of these SaaS apps will work and they'll operate.
02:03 — Hyperscale is a nice name, but it doesn't really describe all that they do. Some of them offer applications, application development. They all offer databases. You've now got SaaS companies that got caught up in just features and functions that don't drive value and don't get companies better prepared for the AI Economy. They're all rolled together now.
03:05 — "Our stock price and our valuation have taken a huge hit because we are being misinterpreted as being part of the SaaS world." We are not in the SaaS neighborhood. We are not a SaaS company. SaaS is on the menu. We're hungry. AI and ServiceNow are going to eat a lot of these, devour a lot of these feature and function application companies.

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In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I break down ServiceNow’s latest AI expansion with Anthropic and what it means for enterprise workflows.
Highlights
00:04 — I recently reported on ServiceNow’s expanded collaboration with OpenAI. That agreement makes OpenAI’s models the go-to solution for companies running upwards of 80 billion annual workflows on the ServiceNow platform.
00:17 — Now, ServiceNow has announced that Anthropic’s Claude models will be integrated into core ServiceNow workflows for tasks like app development, with Claude serving as the default model powering the ServiceNow Build Agent — the company’s tool for easy development of agentic workflows.
00:37 — This is what ServiceNow Chairman and CEO Bill McDermott had to say about the announcement: “ServiceNow and Anthropic are turning intelligence into action through AI-native workflows for the world’s largest enterprises ... Together, we are proving that deeply integrated platforms with an open ecosystem are how the future is built.”
01:12 — In addition to Build Agent, ServiceNow is integrating Claude alongside purpose-built solutions throughout the implementation lifecycle, with the aim of achieving a 50% reduction in the time it takes customers to deploy solutions built on the ServiceNow AI platform.
01:31 — ServiceNow and Anthropic are also building agent-based workflows for specific industries, including healthcare and life sciences, for tasks such as research and analysis. Just as it has done with OpenAI, ServiceNow is integrating Claude directly into workflows — and it’s this integration that can lead to much better outcomes for AI initiatives.
02:03 — By making these model choices the default, ServiceNow removes the guesswork from customer decision-making and enables customers to rely on the company’s expertise to achieve the best results.

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In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I analyze the leadership shift at Workday and what it means in the age of agentic AI.
Highlights
00:00 — I want to talk about a change at the top of Workday. And I want to point out somebody who's been a real superstar in this business and that's Workday co-founder, former co-CEO, former CEO, chairman, executive chairman, resigned as CEO, now back in as CEO, Aneel Bhusri.
01:13 — He was going to be the person that ran all the business, the operations. And Aneel said, "I can go back to what I truly love," which is developing products and strategy. Carl Eschenbach left about a week ago. The board asked Bhusri to step back in as CEO, and he's done that. So there's no question that Aneel Bhusri’s first love is products and strategy.
02:24 — He said, “Now, with Carl Eschenbach coming in a couple of years ago, now I can go do this stuff I really love around products and strategy.” It is this thing about never being trained to do it. He's on the board of directors at General Motors, a highly accomplished executive in a lot of ways. Aneel certainly doesn't need the money.
03:13 — How does a company like Workday or Oracle or SAP or Salesforce balance those two things, the enterprise applications that brought them here, and the agentic AI that has to take them forward? Workday, several months ago, announced Workday ERP. From the outside, you've got SAP and Oracle always aggressively trying to go after Workday customers.
03:59 — I want to mention about Aneel, the way he manages. He said, “I've sort of become”— this is when machine learning, ML, was really becoming hot — “I became the Pied Piper of Workday. I was just going around to all the different developers and engineering teams and just asking developers and engineering teams over and over and over again, what are you doing with ML?"
04:56 — And now they've got two great president-level executives at Workday. Rob Enslin and Gerrit Kazmaier. I think it's very likely that about a year from now, Workday will announce that Bhusri is going to become co-CEO and elevate one of those two, Enslin or Kazmaier, to the co-CEO role with him.

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In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I break down the strategic collaboration between AWS and NTT DATA and what it means for enterprise AI transformation.
Highlights
00:02 — AWS and NTT DATA, an IT and business consultancy, have announced a multi-year collaboration agreement aimed at helping enterprise clients modernize legacy systems and adopt responsible agentic AI at scale. The companies are combining capabilities to develop solutions that modernize workloads and accelerate enterprise transformation across four key areas.
00:48 — Those areas are AI-driven large-scale cloud transformation, industry cloud solutions on AWS, AI and data innovation for modern managed services to improve client experiences, and digital sovereignty and regulated cloud solutions, including the AWS European Sovereign Cloud.
01:05 — This is a particularly significant announcement from AWS, because it goes beyond a traditional infrastructure deal and moves into true enterprise transformation. And there's some serious people power involved in this. NTT DATA has founded an AWS business group that already includes nearly 11,000 AWS Certified Experts with plans to add another 10,000.
02:02 — This collaboration is focused on responsible cloud and AI scaling with a firm focus on security governance and regulatory compliance. For me, it's a really strong example of the power of delivery partners.

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In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I explain why the AI revolution isn’t a bubble — it’s backed by unprecedented backlog growth.
Highlights
00:02 — There are some wild numbers being thrown around here early in 2026 as we think about the CapEx investments that the four hyperscalers — Microsoft, AWS, Google Cloud, and Oracle — are making to build up their AI factories, their AI and cloud infrastructure to meet the incredible demand for AI training, inferencing, cloud transformations, business transformations, and more.
01:28 — The money, the huge revenue, is already there, and it’s growing at an incredible pace. That’s why these companies are investing so much, because the market is so enormous, the potential is so huge. This number —$1.63 trillion — that’s the amount of either RPO or backlog combined that those four companies have generated going forward.
02:12 — The RPO backlog figures for each of these companies are: Microsoft, $625 billion, growing at 110%; Oracle, $523 billion, growing at 438%; AWS, $240 billion, up 40%; Google Cloud, $240 billion, growing at 55%. These are very fresh figures from their Q4 earnings results.
03:28 — Microsoft and Google each going to spend about $185 billion in CapEx this fiscal year; AWS, $200 billion; and Oracle, about $75 billion. That totals up to $645 billion dollars in CapEx. The world has never seen anything like this. We’re into unprecedented territory here.
04:39 — That is money that’s chasing this already committed business in RPO and backlog. This is $1.63 trillion. That’s right here, right now — a snapshot of what they already have in backlog. Even if they don’t come anywhere close to those growth rates, they’re still showing extraordinary growth and vitality.

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