Cloud Wars Live with Bob Evans

In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I discuss how Google Cloud customers can access OpenAI models and Codex agents while leveraging their existing cloud investments.

Highlights

00:03 — OpenAI and Google Cloud are partnering to make OpenAI's models and Codex coding agents available through Google Cloud's Model Garden. Model Garden is part of the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, formerly known as Vertex AI — you'll be forgiven for struggling to keep up with all those name changes.

00:26 — But, back to the news regarding OpenAI. Now, the company says the integration will give customers native access to these models to power complex agentic workflows at scale, backed by Google Cloud's data governance and high-performance infrastructure. So, in practical terms, that means businesses will be able to build AI agents, automate workflows, and improve software development.

01:01 — Now, from a commercial standpoint, customers will be able to purchase OpenAI models through Google Cloud Marketplace and apply spending towards their existing Google Cloud commitments. This can make it easier for businesses already invested in Google Cloud to access OpenAI's technology without having to rethink their existing arrangements regarding the cloud and cloud spend.

01:25 — Now, this is another example of the amazing synergy that we're seeing in the AI Revolution. Here, OpenAI is expanding its enterprise reach, while Google Cloud is giving customers more choice when it comes to AI models. Both companies stand to benefit, and customers gain greater flexibility.

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In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I reveal why Microsoft is falling behind AWS, Google Cloud, and Oracle on two of the most important measures of cloud growth.

Highlights

00:03 — Now that the hyperscalers have all recently issued quarterly numbers, I wanted to take a look at how some of those stack up against each other on some key metrics. And one of the big things that jumped out to me was that Microsoft, despite being the biggest of the hyperscalers, is falling way behind Google Cloud, AWS, and Oracle on some key growth metrics.

01:00 — So, Microsoft, for the quarter ended September 30, its fiscal Q1, but calendar Q3 for everybody — $63.9 billion in revenue and a 30% growth rate. In a vacuum, that is incredible. AWS, however, $46 billion, 39% growth rate, growing significantly faster. We see Google Cloud,$30.7 billion in revenue, grew over 100%, and then Oracle, while much smaller, still a growth rate of 62%.

01:49 — What is going on here with Microsoft? Let's look at a parallel point. This has to do with backlog, or RPO. In Q2, Microsoft's RPO was $678 billion. Q3, it went down by a billion to $677 billion.

02:55 — We see that AWS, Q2, just under $500 billion, jumped to $578 billion. So, it went up $82 billion in backlog, Q2 to Q3. Google Cloud, $514 billion to $561 billion. That's up $47 billion in the same period that Microsoft RPO, or backlog, went down a billion. Oracle, $638 billion to $664 billion.

03:40 — This has been going on for several quarters, and in a very detailed article I've got later today on CloudWars.com, I break those down. Comparing these quarterly revenue growth rates and also the RPO numbers across that time, I do a comparison there.

04:28 — Now, RPO backlog is a measure of future business, right? Contracted business not yet recognized as revenue. So, Microsoft is lagging on that, even though it has the biggest number. It's growing much more slowly than the others, and the same here with quarterly revenue. It's got the biggest revenue, but it's growing more slowly. And again, size does not account for all that.

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In today's Cloud Wars Agent and Copilot Minute, I explore how Microsoft's new AI-powered phishing detection in Teams could transform cybersecurity while raising important questions about user privacy.

Highlights

00:10— Microsoft is introducing a new AI feature to Teams that will detect phishing attempts and scams by analyzing conversations. Now, rather than relying solely on traditional methods of detecting malicious links and files, it uses behavior-based detection to identify suspicious activity in messages.

00:28 — The feature will initially run silently in the background, with warnings potentially appearing when phishing is detected. It will also prioritize conversations with new contacts, as the risk here is generally higher. This is a great use of AI. It shows how companies can use the technology to approach problems differently. In this case, by analyzing behavior at scale to strengthen a company's cybersecurity defenses.

01:03 — Microsoft says message content won't be retained for AI training or other secondary uses, and it says the feature will only be used for security purposes. Now, the rollout is due to begin in November 2026, with general availability expected in the first half of December this year. Crucially, it will be enabled automatically, without requiring IT administrators to configure it.

01:31 — And that's where, for me, things get interesting, complicated. Think back to Microsoft Recall. That's that controversial AI feature that took screenshots of users' screens and was initially planned to be enabled by default. Now, following some pretty significant privacy and security concerns, Microsoft went back to the drawing board and made saving screenshots on Microsoft Recall an opt-in feature.

01:51 — So, introducing another automatically enabled AI feature that analyzes, again, conversations raises an obvious question: Has Microsoft learned from its past mistakes, or is it repeating them?

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In this special episode of Cloud Wars Live from Workday Rising 2026, Bob Evans speaks with Rupesh Ahluwalia, Vice President of HR Information Systems at Concentrix, about how artificial intelligence and enterprise technology are transforming human resources. With more than 430,000 employees across over 80 countries, Concentrix is reimagining how HR supports its global workforce while expanding its technology-driven business. Ahluwalia discusses the company's decade-long relationship with Workday, the growing importance of workforce adaptability, and why meaningful AI transformation must go beyond automation to deliver more intuitive, people-centered employee experiences.

Workday Powers HR Transformation

The Big Themes

• HR Becomes a Strategic Driver: At Concentrix, HR is far more than a traditional back-office function. With more than 430,000 employees across over 80 countries, the company recognizes that its people are its greatest asset. Ahluwalia explains that HR has consistently held a prominent role in organizational decision-making, particularly as Concentrix has expanded through mergers and acquisitions. Rather than separating HR from technological innovation, the company actively integrates its approximately 3,000 HR professionals into technology adoption and business transformation.
• Adaptability Becomes the Essential Skill: Hiring more than 200,000 people annually creates significant workforce planning challenges, especially as emerging technologies introduce roles and skills that barely existed a year earlier. Ahluwalia highlights an unusual recruitment dilemma: How does a company interview candidates for positions when the necessary expertise does not yet exist internally? His answer emphasizes adaptability over mastery of any particular programming language or technical function.
• AI Transformation Must Go Beyond Automation: For Ahluwalia, the greatest opportunity presented by AI is not simply making existing workflows faster. While automating manual tasks and improving efficiency remain valuable, he argues that organizations must question whether certain processes need to exist at all. Concentrix is exploring how AI can fundamentally redesign work rather than merely optimize established procedures. This distinction becomes particularly important at scale, where approximately 50,000 managers still perform activities such as employee performance reviews. Instead of focusing exclusively on simplifying those tasks, Ahluwalia challenges his team to envision a future in which technology completes some activities on employees' behalf.

Big Quote: "We are not looking at saying, okay, can we automate this workflow and reduce 5% of the headcount? We are looking at can we automate that workflow, which reduces the friction in the process and people use the systems better."

Learn More About Concentrix and Workday:

Check out this information on Workday AI and learn more about Concentrix.

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In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I challenge Oracle's skeptics and explain why its aggressive AI infrastructure investments could position the company for extraordinary growth.

Highlights

00:03 — Oracle made a significant announcement last week. It had nothing to do, really, with its technology or partnerships, although those have been remarkable. It had to do with what I have called the monkey on its back, the negative cash flow monkey on its back. And in light of that announcement, I'm recommending to all the Oracle skeptics out there: just breathe.

01:06 — Oracle's already got the incredible demand in the form of contracted business, almost as much as Microsoft has built up in this cloud and AI backlog. No other company ever in the tech industry, in any other industry, has ever assembled a backlog as big as the one Oracle has.

01:47 — In the next three years, that backlog will convert to $332 billion of revenue. So, this is a company with a huge business, customers lined up, demand is there. It's building out the capacity to meet that. To do that buildout, it had to borrow some money, but the big thing is the demand is there.

03:29 — Its RPO is already, like I said, $664 billion. The only company with a bigger RPO backlog is Microsoft, which is $677 billion. So, you know, Oracle's almost on pace with them, bigger than AWS, bigger than Google Cloud. So, at AI World, they had this ambitious product blitz and also partnerships at AI World that are showing that Oracle's not sitting back.

04:00 — Its whole huge portfolio is now 100% oriented around AI. The partnerships are going to push them into new areas, new capabilities. It's partnering with Google to use Google TPUs. It had Sam Altman from OpenAI there. It's infusing OpenAI's technologies throughout all of Oracle's software suite. Its database business is picking up, especially with the Oracle AI Database coming out now.

04:29 — I think that you know I understand why some people say, "Huh, nobody's done this before. What if it doesn't work?" But, Oracle's way of doing things is always say, "Hey, nobody's done this before. We will make it work", and I've got a link in this article to a great presentation at the Oracle Investor Day by the president of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Mahesh Tiagarajan, in which he explains how they're doing that to scale the build out of these data centers.

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In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I break down the growth rates of the hyperscalers and the remarkable comeback AWS is making with its latest growth rates.

Highlights

00:03 — AWS reported strong earnings. While its Q3 growth rate was 39%, up to $46 billion, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said that AWS will hit hypergrowth of 40% or higher throughout all of 2027 and 2028. This is the sixth straight quarter in which AWS has had accelerating growth. This is a remarkable comeback to its growth rates a few years ago.

01:17 — To put it in perspective, that is 39% growth for AWS, 30% growth for Microsoft, and 103% growth for Google Cloud. With the size of AWS, it rolls up to getting closed to an annualized run rate of $200 billion. Microsoft is at about a $250 billion annualized run rate. Google Cloud is at about a $125 billion run rate. Across these three hyperscalers, there's very strong growth overall.

02:44 — Bedrock inference service is undergoing surging growth. Token volume is up 17 times over a year ago and the spending from Fortune 500 is up by seven times. Looking back a few months, AWS's chip business has hit greater than a $25 billion run rate. The AI business, as of three months ago, was at $25 billion.

04:05 — Each of these hyperscaler companies had the opportunity, over the last few years, to go into or develop any products and services they wanted that would best meet the needs of enterprise companies. The ones that are innovating the most directly, effectively, and rapidly along the lines of what customers want will be the winners.

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At Oracle AI World in Las Vegas, Cloud Wars host Bob Evans sits down with Bonnie Tinder, founder and CEO of Raven Intelligence, to explore what enterprise customers are actually experiencing as they implement artificial intelligence. Drawing on conversations with seven Oracle customers across industries, including Heathrow Airport, Baylor University, and Northwell Health, Tinder identifies the critical factors shaping successful AI adoption.

Oracle AI Gets Real

The Big Themes:

• Clean Data Drives AI Success: Clean, reliable data emerged as the most important foundation for successful enterprise AI adoption across all seven customer conversations Bonnie Tinder conducted at Oracle AI World. Organizations emphasized that their systems of record needed to be established and optimized before AI could deliver meaningful value. Baylor University, which implemented Oracle applications in 2020, spent several years strengthening its data foundation before expanding AI-enabled workflows.
• Employee Trust Determines AI Adoption: Trust emerged as a recurring theme. Organizations recognize that employees need confidence in AI-generated information before they will consistently embrace new workflows or recommendations. Introducing unreliable systems or poorly designed processes can damage that confidence and undermine subsequent technology initiatives. Consequently, customers emphasized careful implementation, credible outputs, and practical applications that improve employees' daily experiences.
• Enterprise AI Must Enable Action: The conversation ultimately centered on the transition from systems that record information to systems that help organizations take action. Evans observed that AI is becoming increasingly effective at identifying previously hidden problems, including potential employee turnover, security vulnerabilities, maintenance requirements, and fraud risks. However, uncovering these challenges creates additional responsibilities for business leaders. Tinder argued that organizations must use predictive insights to prevent problems from escalating rather than simply accumulating more information about potential risks.

The Big Quote: "I mean, you could look at the problems that it surfaces and get depressed about it, or you can like actually do something to ensure that those problems don't escalate and snowball."

More from Bonnie Tinder:

Connect with Bonnie on LinkedIn and learn more about Oracle's latest advances.

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In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I analyze the extraordinary growth of Google Cloud, Microsoft's impressive performance, and the changing competitive dynamics of the AI revolution.

Highlights

00:02 — Earlier this week, we got Q3 results from both Google Cloud and Microsoft, and I think the big news for me about both those, while both companies performed very, very well and the growth is really eye-popping, Google Cloud, for the three months ended September 30, is growing three and a half times faster than Microsoft Cloud.

00:36 — Microsoft Cloud revenue grew 30% to $63.9 billion. So, I'm not in any way trying to criticize what Microsoft did here. I mean it's the equivalent of a $250 billion business growing at 30%. That's just unprecedented, unheard of.

01:43 — This isn't a flash in the pan or a one-time thing. Let's look at the growth rates for Google Cloud and Microsoft Cloud over the last seven quarters. Taking nothing away from Microsoft, but the comparison here is striking. And in a detailed article later this morning, I got a couple of bar charts on there that show quite graphically the differences in the growth trajectories of these two stellar companies.

02:38 — And it really is striking, the difference between Google Cloud going like this and Microsoft just barely better than flat. So, I want to again say kudos to Microsoft. It's got a company now, with its growth over the next few quarters on an annualized basis, it's somewhere between a $250 billion and $300 billion company, and the last quarter growing at 30%.

04:18 — Google Cloud added an incremental $5.9 billion in Q3 versus Q2. Microsoft added an incremental $4.6 billion. So, while Microsoft's overall number is bigger, and it deserves full credit for that, Google Cloud is winning more new business quarter to quarter, right here, right now, than Microsoft is, and that is stunning.

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In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I examine how Larry Ellison, Mike Sicilia, and Clay Magouyrk are positioning Oracle for its next phase of AI-driven growth.

Highlights

00:03 —We're here at Oracle AI World in Las Vegas, and really, the last couple days, were an AI innovation blitz across technologies, partnerships, go-to-market plans, across the whole breadth of Oracle's portfolio, and some striking new technology vendors that some might consider potentially competitors of Oracle's now coming in with partnerships.

01:24 — Oracle is accelerating, and what I like to point out to anybody who talks about the debt issues: yes, that's real. It's not an ideal thing, but there's a time sequence that's going on here. And what the great news is for Oracle is, with $664 billion in backlog, or RPO, it's got plenty of money in line that's going to be converted to revenue.

02:13 — Google, a few months ago, said it was going to start to offer its TPU chips on the market to others. Oracle is now the first hyperscaler to deploy those. Snowflake and Oracle have created a native AI data service that's going to make it easier for enterprises to access and act upon all of their data.

03:32 — But, I thought the highlight at the end of the day, Larry Ellison came out on stage. There had been some question, you know, was he going to appear here? He no longer participates in the earnings calls, and he came out. It was really quite a moving discussion. He talked by himself for a little bit about the Oracle healthcare applications, the full suite they've put together, the impact AI is going to have on that.

04:33 — He said he believes that, with the help of AI, that all cancers are going to be eradicated in the next five to 10 years. He said it'll certainly be 10 years. Said it might be as soon as five, and he said, imagine if you can project into other industries the benefits and the achievements that AI can help deliver there.

05:00 — The CEOs, Mike Sicilia and Clay Magouyrk, both gave impressive keynotes. They both showed that they're not just in the position of CEO, but they're in control of the company and steering its future direction. And then you've got the extraordinary, you know, once-in-a-lifetime visionary Larry Ellison helping to guide things along from the chairman's point of view.

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In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I explore the growing security threats facing AI agents and why Microsoft is investing in protecting organizations from emerging attacks.

Highlights

00:25 —  All these different breaches [are] happening in the space of agents ... because there's an opportunity here for people to be able to consume and utilize tokens from other providers. It's going to be a situation where we've got to keep an eye on this now.

00:44 — One of the most recent intrusions was a CERT India firm, and they didn't see any of the actual issues come in from the breach that they recently had. And this is very interesting because who then reported it? How do we know that there was a breach? The answer is that the actual providers of the different platforms are actually seeing these breaches, not the actual people being breached.

01:33 — So. what we are seeing is companies like Microsoft, with their Defender, can now pick up 60 different agent types that might be doing something nefarious within organizations. So, what we're going to see is a general view across this that we need a way to be able to secure and make sure that people are not actually getting access to information they shouldn't through agent-based technology.

02:00 — Now, even the Microsoft security chief had said that frontier models cannot be trusted. Now, does this mean that we can't trust the AI model to do something or not to do something? It's more along the lines that these models will want to solve a problem, so they will go and they will try to figure out a way to solve the problem.

03:26 — Two goals: one is make sure that we don't see any breaches happening, and number two is that we also want to make sure that we don't see people attacking for denial-of-service attacks or trying to take on and use AI credits from another organization. And I will leave you with this: Satya Nadella himself said, "We simply can't outsource responsibility for what intelligence does on our behalf," and that's very true.

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