As Salesforce, ServiceNow and IBM have all recently warmly welcomed the hot “platform companies” in the cloud market, Larry Ellison and Oracle almost eliminated “platforms” from public speeches.
So, what happened here?
My most important reaction is that I am very happy to see that the industry has surpassed the early abbreviations of IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. In the industry bubble, all these meanings are always much more than the meaning to customers.
Therefore, when Bill McDermott recently talked enthusiastically about how ServiceNow became a “platform company”, it was great to see that he did not say that it was a “PaaS” company. I think that as the cloud becomes the dominant IT architecture in the digital economy, the “as-a-service” descriptor becomes the remaining sixth finger.
However, a platform is a platform you build, and it accurately describes what ServiceNow and Salesforce and IBM do with the current array of cloud services.
It also describes what Oracle is doing with its cloud services, but Larry Ellison always goes his own way. In this case, he seems to have decided very clearly to define Oracle as an infrastructure and application company. Moreover, because Ellison wanted to showcase Oracle’s infrastructure capabilities, he even took the steps of migrating its cloud-native autonomous database to the infrastructure camp when the traditional cloud taxonomy was strictly classified as a platform category. (For more information, see Why Larry Ellison and Oracle reinvented the cloud language)
My guess on Ellison’s thinking is this: He knows that the Oracle database has become the world’s most important database. Therefore, in the “cloud war”, he has won the classic platform category of the database.but The winning hand that Ellison *really* wants is infrastructure.smallo He is using a unique autonomous database and called it an infrastructure product, and as a follow-up work, he avoided any discussion of the platform.
My other three companies are not Top 10 Cloud Wars: Sales force, Ranked No. 3; IBM Corporation, Ranked 7th; and Current service, Ranking 9th:
Sales force
In early June, after discovering the fascinating slides of Salesforce’s first quarter earnings report, I wrote an article titled Salesforce Shocker: Its number one revenue business is “platform and others” Started with this jaw-dropping slide and my accompanying analysis:
Although Salesforce has been hailed as a powerful SaaS force throughout its 21 years of development, as the shape of the enterprise cloud continues to evolve, its largest and fastest growing business is now “platforms and others.”
As shown in FIG Salesforce’s first quarter financial report (Slide 8) The business unit called Platform and Other has surpassed Marc Benioff’s service, sales, marketing and business foundation cloud.
IBM Corporation
A few weeks ago, after IBM reported a 30% increase in cloud revenue in the second quarter, I published an article Why IBM CEO Arvind Krishna’s debut quarter got an A+.IIn this case, I use it as part of the reason for my highest score:
Krishna simplifies the cloud messaging that IBM has previously suffered. He now simply refers to it as a “hybrid cloud platform,” which includes all $23 billion in cloud revenue in the past 12 months. I can’t say that I like this name, but it is definitely better than before, and the “hybrid cloud platform” has played a role in some of the key market dynamics today.
Current service
Last week, I summarized the latest performance of Bill McDermott’s ServiceNow strategy. How Bill McDermott and ServiceNow control the pace of change. In that article, I provided this view:
“This is the power of the Now platform: fast mobility, agility, the ability to quickly solve problems through low-code, no-code application development, and create new workflows that provide a great experience,” McDermott said ServiceNow second quarter earnings call last week.
“Even if customers take advantage of the opportunities of digital transformation, we are helping them solve the challenges of generations.”
Since taking over as CEO of ServiceNow 9 months ago, McDermott has leveraged the company’s superior technology and unique market position in the following ways:
- Reposition ServiceNow as a platform company that also provides certain applications;
- Promote ServiceNow to become the role of the digital Rosetta Stone, which can transform mismatched data sets, applications and systems into the unified language of modern digital business;
- Explicitly predict that ServiceNow will become a $10 billion company (now less than $4 billion) Triple the number of employees Within a few years; recently,
- By shifting their focus from traditional business process silos to modern digital workflow paradigms, they are expected to help corporate customers develop at the pace of today’s crazy period.
Final thoughts
Although Oracle reversed the platform trend here, it’s not surprising, because this is how Larry Ellison works: he went his own way.
For ServiceNow, this is McDermott’s influence, unleashing the true power and capabilities of the company’s technology to meet today’s highest priority needs.
For Salesforce, this is the impact of MuleSoft’s acquisition, and it is also the company’s growing strategic position in customer operations.
For IBM, this is the position clearly stated by the new CEO Arvind Krishna, which integrates Red Hat’s functions into IBM’s larger range of functions to ensure customer stability, innovation and opportunities.
For the entire Cloud Wars, the focus and location are aligned with the customer’s needs and needs, rather than based on the location that the software engineer just builds.
#Larry #Ellison #Salesforce #ServiceNow #IBM