For the 133rd episode of Burning Platform, we host Bob Evans of Cloud Wars, a highly respected, long-time observer of enterprise technology trends
We discuss comments from Satya Nadella of Microsoft that we have moved to the age of digital agents and they will cause the end of SaaS and broadly other business applications, which he says essentially only provide skin deep services front-ending databases – create, replace, update, delete (CRUD). Satya can speak with credibility at Wall Street which values Microsoft at 10X that of enterprise vendors like Salesforce and SAP. In turn, Marc Benioff of Salesforce has taken shots at Microsoft’s Copilot AI offering being too dependent on OpenAI and the Consumer Web and called it underwhelming in the Enterprise, especially compared to his own agents.
Bob also points out that Bill McDermott of ServiceNow, without naming specific competitors has warned of the “imminent “collapse of the software-industrial complex” whose limitations pose existential threats to businesses that have poured tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars into those outdated technologies.”
We discuss that Aneel Bhusri of Workday emphasized during their recent Innovation Summit that we will need to focus a lot more on Agentic TCO and ROI.
We discuss that architectural shifts in the enterprise tend to be additive, rather than “kill” incumbents – so we have ended up with a diverse portfolio of mainframe, client/server and cloud technologies and now will need to also add Agentic to the mix.
We then discuss the excitement around AI, the cautious uptake of agents at customers, Jensen Huang of NVIDIA already calling for the next wave of “Physical AI” and the need for agents to reflect massive global and industry changes being unleashed by the Trump administration.
Plenty more in this wide-ranging 45 minute conversation with this veteran industry analyst.
