Latest Articles Archives -

Workday Faces 3 Key Questions as $4-Billion Run Rate Looms

October 14, 2019

Well on its way to a $4-billion annualized run rate, Workday is approaching that point where a large and successful company needs to address strategic questions in order to become a very large and very successful company. The company’s annual customer conference, Workday Rising, opens today. So it’s the perfect time to take a look

Bill McDermott is stepping down as SAP CEO

How Bill McDermott Rescued SAP in its Darkest Hour: Courageous Leadership

October 11, 2019

It was early 2011. SAP had been rocked by slumping sales, a depressed stock price, unhappy customers, a disenchanted workforce, and a disastrous but short-lived CEO appointment. At a sales kickoff meeting, newly named co-CEO Bill McDermott took the stage. He told the global sales team that not only would the company get back on

#1 Microsoft Cloud Revenue Tops #3 Salesforce, #4 SAP, #5 Oracle and #6 Google Combined

October 10, 2019

While Salesforce, SAP, Oracle and Google all have high-growth cloud businesses, a true measure of Microsoft’s mass and momentum is that its cloud revenue will exceed the combined total of those four competitors’ cloud revenue for the quarter ended Sept. 30. Here’s how I expect the numbers to line up for these heavyweights in my

IBM CEO Ginni Rometty talks with Red Hat leadership ahead of Q3 results announcement.

IBM’s $33-Billion Bet on Red Hat: The Stakes Are Enormous

October 9, 2019

A few months ago, in a piece headlined IBM’s $19-Billion Cloud Business: Where Did the Growth Go?, I pulled together some numbers revealing that the slowest-growth cloud business in the Cloud Wars Top 10 is clearly IBM’s. That piece also touched on the high hopes—the extremely high hopes—IBM is pinning on its $33-billion acquisition of

Will Marc Benioff announce that Salesforce is moving its cloud operations from Oracle to AWS?

Will Salesforce Dump Oracle and Pick AWS? An Insider’s Perspective

October 7, 2019

The long-running love-hate thing between Oracle and Salesforce could boil over next month if Salesforce uses its massive Dreamforce extravaganza to announce that it’s shifting its cloud operations from Oracle to Amazon’s AWS. That’s the scenario offered in a compelling LinkedIn post by Jiri Kram. In the October 4 piece, Kram builds his case on

#1 Microsoft, #2 Amazon Will Drive Cloud Wars Top 10 Over $40 Billion for Q3

October 4, 2019

With #1 Microsoft and #2 Amazon likely to generate $20 billion in cloud revenue for the 3 months ended Sept. 30, the Cloud Wars Top 10 vendors should combine for more than $40 billion for that quarter. We’ll get the exact details for several companies later this month as earnings releases come out for Microsoft,

At OpenWorld 2019, Larry Ellison introduced Oracle Autonomous Linux

10 Things Larry Ellison Wants You to Know about Oracle Autonomous Linux

October 3, 2019

Linux is taking on a higher-profile role in the enterprise-cloud market. Following revitalized strategies from IBM Red Hat and SUSE, Oracle chairman Larry Ellison figured it was high time to explain just how wonderful his own new version of Linux is. During a keynote at Oracle’s recent OpenWorld event, Ellison described in great detail the

Azure chief Jason Zander talks about Microsoft's billion-dollar cloud

Inside Microsoft’s Billion-Dollar Cloud Deals: Driving ‘Innovation Agendas’

October 1, 2019

With Microsoft on pace to generate $50 billion in commercial-cloud revenue in its current fiscal year, it was fascinating to hear a top Azure executive describe how Microsoft's been able to land some billon-dollar or $500-million cloud deals recently. We got a preview during Microsoft’s fiscal-Q4 earnings call on July 18. That's when CEO Satya

Oracle chairman Larry Ellison and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella talk autonomous databases

Microsoft Versus Oracle on Autonomous Databases: Microsoft’s Approach

September 30, 2019

While Microsoft and Oracle have recently forged a broad partnership to help business customers work across both vendors’ clouds, there’s no question that Microsoft and Oracle will continue to compete aggressively in multiple areas. One of those highly competitive segments is the booming category of cloud-native databases. And since we’ve taken a close look at

As Amazon, Microsoft and Google Rise, 3 Key Cloud Findings from IDC

September 27, 2019

As businesses surge into the cloud, spending on hardware for public-cloud infrastructure is plunging even as it's rising for private clouds, says a new report from IDC. 2020 will mark the first year that infrastructure spending for cloud will exceed that for traditional IT, says IDC. I’ll toss a handful of numbers at you in

Category: Latest Articles