More than 3 months ago, in recognition of massive demand for cloud computing among large businesses, I posted a prediction: Cloud Revenue Surging to $158 Billion for Top 10 Vendors in 2019. As December unfolds, that forecast is looking pretty good—it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if that total comes in at $160 billion or more. Here are my company-by-company predictions for calendar 2019, with a followup thought for each:
#1 Microsoft, $44.7 billion. On its way to $50 billion in cloud revenue for its fiscal year ending June 30, Microsoft’s cloud business is booming on all fronts.
#2 Amazon, $35.2 billion. While AWS’s growth rate is declining, it’s still scaling at a very healthy pace. This week’s huge re:Invent conference will stir up some interest.
#3 Salesforce, $16.3 billion. Marc Benioff now vows the company will generate $35 billion in cloud revenue for fiscal-year 2024, ending Jan. 31, 2024.
#4 SAP, $7.7 billion. New co-CEOs Christian Klein and Jennifer Morgan are promising to knock down internal silos and recommit to ensuring customer success.
#5 Oracle, $7.1 billion. After trying various approaches to the cloud over the past several years, Larry Ellison has locked in on his new cloud-native Autonomous Database as the foundation of Oracle’s cloud aspirations.
#6 Google Cloud, $9 billion. Wrapping up his first year as CEO, Thomas Kurian has completely reinvigorated Google Cloud with a customer-first mindset.
#7 IBM, $21 billion. Recent moves by IBM indicate it’s beginning to pair up different pieces of its huge organization to drive new value for customers.
#8 Workday, $3.5 billion. As it becomes the dominant HCM player in the Fortune 100, Aneel Bhusri is committed to making Workday a world leader in ML.
#9 ServiceNow, $3.4 billion. Already performing at a very high level, ServiceNow is strapping in for re-acceleration at the launch of the Bill McDermott era.
#10 Accenture, about $10 billion. After showing signs of being a breakthrough cloud-services company, Accenture now blending cloud into broader “digital” bucket.