Cloud Wars Live with Bob Evans

• AI Agent & Copilot Podcast: John Accardi on Technology Evolutions, Getting Started with AI

  Key TakeawaysCareer journey and Microsoft involvement: While he's been in the industry for a long time, Accardi recounts being in the Microsoft arena for about 14 to 15 years. "My entire career has been around technology...and I have familiarity with various platforms," he notes. He has filled a range of roles, including sales leadership, marketing, product management, and more. Over the past several years, he has been "very heavily involved in the Microsoft alliance, their marketing, their programs, and most recently, leading for the last seven years in Microsoft practice."Technology evolution: With the impact of AI and evolving technologies, Accardi says this is "almost like history repeating itself...This is just another technology that's making our lives more efficient." Accepting change and new things is always difficult, regardless of what's at play. While initial AI adoption might have been moderate, it has really picked up over the last several months. Questions around AI outcomes have been top of mind lately.Where to start: It takes curiosity, creativity, and critical thinking to consider how to get started with a pilot and build from there. Accardi talks about the conversations they have with clients to determine what they want to accomplish and within what timeline. It's essential to understand what clients want to see their organization become, then find a pilot area to explore how it could work.The impact of AI: It's important to remember "AI isn't going to come in here and replace all of us, but it's really meant to make us more efficient." Although AI has introduced a fast pace of change, it's also been a fast pace of impact. AI can impact the whole organization, so stakeholders must all be involved. It can increase efficiency and productivity for clients in a major way. Visit Cloud Wars for more.

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• Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian's Crowning Achievement

  In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I break down why Google Cloud’s new Gemini Enterprise may be Thomas Kurian’s most ambitious and most defining move yet.Highlights00:14 — One of the fastest-growing companies in the Cloud Wars Top 10 — and one that has been the most innovative, successful, and is definitely making a run at the number one spot — is Google Cloud. And I think that this week, as Thomas Kurian begins his eighth year as CEO of Google Cloud, he has recently pulled together what I'm calling his crowning achievement.01:15 — It's what it's done here with Gemini Enterprise. I think it is the perfect fit to simplify and accelerate the journey into the cloud — or, I'm sorry, into AI, the AI economy — for their business customers. Gemini Enterprise says, “We can do the whole thing end-to-end ... But you're free to pick and choose any of the different pieces of it — bring in other vendors, other technologies."02:13 — I think what they're doing here is saying, “We've taken care of the heavy lifting of the underlying technology, everything from the models to the platform to the developer tools to governance and security and privacy. You, the customer, can now focus on unleashing your people and their creativity to build on this platform to help drive those great business outcomes you want.”03:03 — So, different companies at different points in their evolutions and transformations can pick what they want. The big thing: faster time to value, because it's ready to go out of the box. There’s not a lot of patchwork to be done now.04:00 — Kurian has taken the best of the cloud with the best of AI, and offered them up to customers in a seamless package that delivers not just the underlying technology but this sense I talked about that they can move into this very exciting but also very different AI economy with a lot of confidence about where they're headed and what's going on. Visit Cloud Wars for more.

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• Microsoft Ignite: Renowned Futurists Map Out the Next Era of Enterprise AI Success

  In today's Cloud Wars Agent and Copilot Minute, I look at how screen-aware Copilots, task-based agents, and multimodal interfaces are reshaping enterprise work — and why identity, permissions, and access guardrails now matter more than ever.Highlights00:30 — Two experts, Brian Madden, Vice President and Field Technology Officer and Futurist at Citrix, and Marco Casalaina, Vice President of Products, Core AI and an AI Futurist at Microsoft, hosted a session at this year's Microsoft Ignite conference titled “Develop Your Enterprise Playbook to Prepare for the AI of Tomorrow.”00:58 — I want to share some key takeaways. Madden laid out a seven-stage roadmap for human–AI collaboration. Steps included simple prompt and paste, the first introduction to AI; next, AI as an analyst for colleagues; followed by AI watching your screen; AI using your computer for you; AI using your computer without you watching; multi-agent AI communication; and the final step: AI-orchestrated work.01:55 — Ultimately, AI needs to work where human knowledge workers work, because the world we live in today is built for humans, and the way that AI will succeed is by operating within this user space and emulating humans in practice. Users talk to AI, and AI talks to the applications and workflows on behalf of the user.02:34 — The discussion moved on to the notion of apps dissolving into data, ultimately AI talking directly to the data without going through an application. Casalaina demonstrated this by running Anthropic’s Claude on Azure and giving it the skills to create a PowerPoint. It did — without using PowerPoint. It made the slides in HTML and then converted them without ever opening the PowerPoint application. Visit Cloud Wars for more.

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• Hottest in Cloud/AI: Palantir #1, Google Cloud #2, Oracle #3

  In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I reveal how Palantir leapfrogged the competition with 63% cloud growth, shaking up the Cloud Wars Top 10.Highlights00:14 — Periodically, I do an update on what I call the Cloud Wars Growth Chart. The latest list shows that Palantir — new to the Cloud Wars Top 10 — is number one in fastest growth, by a long shot. Google Cloud, which for the last six quarters had been the fastest growing, is now in the number two spot. Oracle comes in at number three.01:06 — So let’s see here: Palantir — look at this — 63% growth to $1.12 billion. Previous quarter growth rate: 48%. Pretty nice when you can go from 48% to 63% in a market like this. So the question is: What is Palantir doing that has allowed them to grow at these dramatically higher growth rates?02:05 — Number two, Google Cloud. 34% growth to $15.2 billion. That’s an acceleration from the previous quarter’s 32% growth. The third: Oracle. 28% growth, $7.2 billion in cloud revenue — up from 27%. SAP grew 27% in Q3, $6.14 billion. Previously 28%. Then Microsoft grew 26% in cloud revenue to $49.1 billion for the quarter, down from the previous quarter’s growth rate of 27%.03:07 — We saw growth throughout the Cloud Wars Top 10. Six of the nine that report their cloud revenue said that they are seeing accelerating growth from one quarter ago to their most recent quarter. So six out of nine growth rates going up, even as they're getting bigger. Now the outlier there is IBM, which does not break out its cloud revenue.03:47 — The other big thing I see coming along is that we are moving into a place now where it’s becoming fuzzy between cloud and AI. Because cloud, after all, is the delivery vehicle that has made AI now something accessible to every individual in the world.04:40 — So, we see these sort of intertwined, bonded pairs of cloud and AI. It’s been fascinating to watch this. And these growth rates show the market is getting hotter. These companies are growing faster — for the most part — remarkable. So, hats off to Palantir, Google Cloud, Oracle, and all the others on this list. Visit Cloud Wars for more.

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• Workday's Acquisition of Sana Delivers AI-Enabled Knowledge Access to Customers

  In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I discuss Workday's acquisition of the enterprise knowledge and learning platform provider Sana, and what it means for customers.Highlights0:05 — Now,the understanding of the capabilities of LLMs has seeped from discussions among in-the-know business leaders into the general public. Personally, I don't know anyone who hasn't tried ChatGPT at least once. However, when it comes to leveraging LLMs and their associated technologies in a business context, it all comes down to the data that you can provide.0:34 — Essentially, it's about making internal knowledge useful. This combination of business data and LLMs is the golden ticket for companies that want to thrive in the AI Revolution. There are some standout examples of companies making that possible. One such company is Sana. Now, Workday has announced that it has completed its acquisition of Sana.01:17 — Gerrit Kazmaier, President Product & Technology at Workday, explained: "By bringing Sana's leading enterprise knowledge and learning to Workday, we're creating a single intelligent interface...We're unlocking a new era of productivity, focus and flow across our customers, organizations with a complete AI solution for the next generation enterprise."01:46 — Kazmaier is describing the combination of Sana's enterprise knowledge tools and Workday's unified cloud platform and formidable partner ecosystem. The vision is to create what Workday calls a "horizontal intelligence layer" across the enterprise. Within this layer, users will have access to deeply personalized experiences.02:34 — Now, as I've discussed many times before, cutting through the noise to identify the specific features, capabilities, data, sources and outcomes that a user needs is essential for thriving in this increasingly competitive, AI-enabled business environment. Visit Cloud Wars for more.

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