World's Fastest

As growth rates across the Cloud Wars Top 10 moderate during the ongoing volatile economic climate, three companies distinguished themselves with Q4 cloud-revenue growth rates above 30%: Oracle, 43%; SAP, 33%; and Google Cloud, 32%.

I’ve mentioned before that it’s more than a little ironic that the two fastest-growing major cloud vendors are Oracle and SAP, two “legacy” companies that many self-proclaimed know-it-alls have blithely dismissed over the past few years as chug-along Model T’s unable to compete in the Maserati world of the cloud.

As it turns out, customers are not terribly interested in the purity of a cloud-only pedigree, but are instead keenly focused on forging strategic partnerships with cloud vendors that can help them move aggressively into the realms of hybrid cloud and multi-cloud to compete successfully in the digital economy.

And, as is always the case, the reigns of Oracle and SAP at the top of the Cloud Wars Top 10 Growth chart will almost certainly be temporary. This market is too big, too disruptive, too wall-to-wall innovative, and simply too demanding for any single company to secure a long-term lease in the cloud-growth penthouse.

In this edition of the Cloud Wars Top 10 Growth Chart, the world’s largest and most-influential cloud providers have organized themselves into three distinct clusters plus one asterisk:

The high-flyers: As noted above, this over-30% group includes Oracle, SAP, and Google Cloud.

The strong and steady: Microsoft, ServiceNow, and Workday delivered 22% growth in their most-recent quarters.

The underachievers: Salesforce at 14% and IBM with its 8% cloud-revenue growth failed to keep pace with the overall market.

The asterisk: Snowflake delivered another quarter of explosive growth, with product revenue up 67%. But because Snowflake remains so much smaller than the other Top 10 companies —its most-recent quarterly revenue was $523 million — I’m not placing it by its growth rate on these Cloud Wars Top 10 Growth Charts until its quarterly revenue tops $1 billion.

As you can see in the chart, the most-recent earnings results for three of the Top 10 companies —Workday, Salesforce, and Snowflake — were issued almost three months ago, so their revenue figures are a bit out of date. Each will release fiscal-Q4 numbers for the quarter ended Jan. 31 within the next couple of weeks: Workday on Feb. 27, and both Salesforce and Snowflake on March 1.

I realize that this iteration of the Growth Chart incorporates these slightly out-of-phase numbers for those three companies, but such are the vagaries of reporting cycles — and I promise the next version of the Growth Chart will give Workday, Salesforce, and Snowflake the advantage of hot-off-the-presses numbers.