Cloud Wars Live with Bob Evans

By Bob EvansBusiness News Technology

Cloud Wars Live with Bob Evans episodes

May 21Palantir's Chad Wahlquist: AI Agents Are Compressing Months Into Days
In this Cloud Wars special report, Bob Evans speaks with Chad Wahlquist, Architect at Palantir, about the company’s explosive Q1 performance and the deeper forces driving enterprise AI adoption. Wahlquist explains how Palantir’s model goes far beyond traditional software, combining forward deployed engineering, ontology, agentic AI, and enterprise infrastructure to accelerate customer outcomes.
AI Infrastructure Rising
The Big Themes:
AI Building AI: One of the most striking themes is the shift from companies building AI products to building AI products with AI. Wahlquist describes a major evolution in enterprise delivery models, where Palantir has moved from “boot camps” to “agent camps,” using AI agents to help rapidly construct customer solutions. This dramatically compresses timelines from projects expected to take months down to days. The deeper implication is that AI is no longer just the product layer; it is becoming the production mechanism itself.

SAP Migration Gets Reinvented: The SAP partnership emerges as one of the most strategically significant parts of the discussion. Wahlquist describes Palantir helping customers accelerate complex ERP migrations, including ECC-to-S/4 transformations, acquired-company integrations, and even mainframe modernization. Traditionally, these efforts consume years and hundreds of millions of dollars. Palantir’s approach uses ontology plus agentic frameworks to interpret structured and unstructured enterprise information, identify mismatches, and automate execution paths. He claims 50%+ time compression in migration work.

Efficiency As Corporate Proof Point: One fascinating element is Palantir’s operating model itself. Evans references Alex Karp’s claim that a company of Palantir’s scale would traditionally employ thousands of salespeople, while Palantir operates with a dramatically leaner commercial organization. Wahlquist argues that product effectiveness changes the equation: engineers demonstrating working systems on customer data become the real sales force. He also notes Palantir internally runs on its own software, using Foundry-based systems for CRM, ticketing, finance, and operations. This creates both operational efficiency and credibility.
The Big Quote: “What I’m seeing here is really the difference between, hey, I’m building AI products to I’m building AI products with AI.”
More from Chad Wahlquist:
Connect with Chad on LinkedIn, or learn about Palantir Foundry.
Visit Cloud Wars for more.
20 min
May 21 Inside Palantir's 70% Q1 Surge + SAP Partnership
In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I unpack why Palantir’s customer-first AI approach is outperforming much larger rivals.
Highlights
00:06 — One of the drivers in 2025 and 2026 of that surge in the greatest growth market here has been Palantir, relatively small. It'll probably do seven and a half, $8 billion in the coming year.
00:42 — So I had a great chat, you can see it all, a one-on-one video conversation with Palantir architect Chad Wahlquist. Palantir's titles are a little peculiar, right? It has its own way of doing things, as it does in a number of ways. Chad's not just a typical enterprise architect.
01:23 — One of the things that's unique about Palantir is how its customers will come, sign an original deal, and then in a very short period of time, three, four, six months, greatly increase that deal because it's showing the value of the AI to the customer.
02:18 — Palantir is the company, I think, in sort of the more modern era, that's really brought this to the forefront. Chad and I talked about the partnership and the significance of that for customers, bringing together the immense data and industry expertise that SAP has.
03:15 — It's not a big rip-and-replace thing. How can we build on what you have and get you some very quick returns on this? Palantir's number one on the growth chart at 70%. Google Cloud surged into the number two spot at 63%.
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5 min
May 20 Anthropic, Google Cloud, and the New AI Compute Arms Race
In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I examine how AI demand is reshaping rivalries between Google Cloud, AWS, NVIDIA, and Anthropic.
Highlights
00:03 — According to reports, Anthropic has committed to a $200 billion five-year agreement for Google Cloud services and Google-designed chips, a deal that could account for more than 40% of Google Cloud's revenue backlog.
00:18 — This represents yet another escalation in the rapidly expanding partnership between Google Cloud's parent company, Alphabet, and Anthropic, following Alphabet's previously announced $40 billion investment into the company.
00:49 — The company also holds considerable infrastructure deals with providers, including AWS and NVIDIA, and what this deal underscores is the extraordinary scale of demand for AI services. The need for compute capacity has grown so large that even a $200 billion agreement may not be enough to meet future requirements.
01:33 — However, companies like Google Cloud, with the infrastructure required to support hyperscale AI development, are positioned at the very center of this massive transformation.
Visit Cloud Wars for more.
3 min
May 19Google Cloud’s Matt Renner on Why Enterprise AI Demand Is Exploding
In this Cloud Wars conversation, Bob Evans speaks with Matt Renner, Chief Revenue Officer at Google Cloud, about the explosive acceleration of enterprise AI adoption and how Google Cloud is scaling to meet it. Renner explains why customers are demanding immediate business outcomes, not experimental pilots years down the road, and shares Google Cloud’s response through expanded field engineering investments, ecosystem funding, and deeper enterprise co-creation. The discussion also explores Google’s differentiated AI stack strategy, the intensifying competitive landscape, and why AI security could become one of the industry’s most significant next battlegrounds.Google’s AI Scaling Play
The Big Themes:
AI Demand Has Moved Beyond Experimentation: Matt Renner makes clear that enterprise AI has entered a fundamentally different phase. Companies are no longer satisfied with proof-of-concept experimentation or exploratory pilots. Instead, executive teams want measurable business value quickly. This urgency is reshaping vendor expectations, deployment models, and customer engagement strategies. Google Cloud is seeing demand at a pace that traditional scaling models cannot satisfy, which is driving operational changes. This is not a speculative future trend, it is already happening.

The $750 Million Ecosystem Expansion Multiplies Capacity: Google Cloud’s $750 million ecosystem investment complements the FDE initiative by scaling partner-led implementation capacity. Renner explains that Google alone cannot meet enterprise AI demand, so partner ecosystems become force multipliers. The strategy is to expand from hundreds of specialists into thousands of technical practitioners capable of building agents, workflows, and AI-powered solutions. This reflects a practical recognition that enterprise AI requires broad execution capability, not just core platform excellence.

The AI Market Reset Is Reshaping Cloud Competition: Renner describes AI as a market reset that is materially changing competitive cloud dynamics. Google Cloud’s growth rates, contrasted against hyperscaler rivals, are presented as evidence that strategic positioning matters. The broader takeaway is that AI has altered enterprise buying criteria, infrastructure priorities, and vendor differentiation. Long-term investments in chips, models, data infrastructure, and platform integration are beginning to show commercial returns. Rather than incremental cloud evolution, Renner presents this as a structural shift in the market. Enterprises are reallocating attention and budgets around AI capability.
The Big Quote: “We’re seeing unprecedented demand for Google Cloud products infrastructure, all driven, frankly, from AI."
More from Matt Renner and Google Cloud:
Connect with Matt Renner on LinkedIn or learn more about Google Cloud AI.
Visit Cloud Wars for more.
13 min
May 19 Google Cloud Launches AI FDE's to Accelerate AI Transformation
In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I look at how Google Cloud is pairing technical innovation with go-to-market execution to fuel AI growth.
Highlights
00:00 — One of the fastest-growing companies in the Cloud Wars Top 10 is Google Cloud, and it has just launched a program of Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs), specializing in AI to help accelerate AI transformation at the point of the customer.
00:46 — I had a chance to speak about this new AI FDE program with Matt Renner, President and Chief Revenue Officer at Google Cloud, and he was talking about how this brings the innovation out at the point of the customer, the unique challenges customers are facing right now.
01:38 — It isn't Google Cloud's attempt to get into the services business so much as this is what the demand is from customers now: they need to get their AI capabilities up to speed as quickly as possible to become the AI-powered type of company they're going to need to be.
02:25 — Google Cloud, as I've mentioned before, has always been an on-the-front-edge technological innovator, but over the past couple of years, it's been bringing its go-to-market capabilities and go-to-market innovation up.
03:36 — These efforts are going to be ways to help ensure that customers have the support, the resources, the expertise from Google Cloud and the ecosystem to be able to evolve, innovate, and succeed more rapidly than ever before.
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5 min
May 18 SAP, Palantir Ask: 'Software' Obsolete in AI Era?
In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I connect SAP, Palantir, and Ford to AI’s expanding economic disruption.
Highlights
00:11 — Recently, both SAP, number four on the Cloud Wars Top 10, and Palantir, number five on the Cloud Wars Top 10, have asked: Are we reaching the end of the term software or software company?
00:47 — But I think their idea is that, what we've thought of as software, what we've come to picture it to be, the image we have in our head, the mindset we have around software, is just getting blown away by what AI is capable of.
01:07 — Last week at the SAP Sapphire event, CEO Christian Klein said, “Will SAP be a software company in the future?” He asked the SAP Joule AI Assistant to answer the question, and Joule said, “SAP is going to be a business AI company.”
02:00 — Palantir CEO Alex Karp said, “You can't just lump what we're doing into the term software.” He said, “We're going to have to create a new term, because what we're doing goes beyond software,” and suggested the term AI infrastructure.
04:07 — Ford had built an enormous factory to build electric vehicle batteries, but now is considering shifting toward batteries for AI data centers, showing how AI’s impact is extending beyond tech into the broader global economy.
Visit Cloud Wars for more.
6 min
May 15 SAP CTO Herzig on Business AI Platform, API Policy, Innovation
In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I unpack SAP CTO Philipp Herzig’s perspective on AI, APIs, and the company’s next era beyond traditional software.
Highlights
00:01 — As part of our ongoing analysis of the massive changes that SAP rolled out this past week at their Sapphire event in Orlando, I had an interesting one-on-one conversation with SAP Chief Technology Officer Philipp Herzig, where he discussed a range of things. Particularly this notion of how, as SAP begins to move beyond applications into the realm of AI, what that means across everything from their new Business AI platform [to] updates to their API policy.
00:37 — I think some people got their knickers in a knot unnecessarily over those API changes and the general pace of innovation that not only SAP is cranking out, but that customers are working very hard to consume so that those customers can become leaders in their industries.
01:24 — How does this shape the company that SAP is becoming in the future? And even as talked about with CEO Christian Klein posing the question during his keynote, will SAP be a software company in the future?
02:07 — One of the things that Herzig said was, we've got so many more people using more and more of our APIs, agents are going to access data from all across the company, and certain things just have to be tightened up. One of the biggest things [SAP] did, was try to ensure that there's more security.
03:20 — So, lively discussion here. I think this was a momentous event for SAP, the things they introduced, the way they're talking about going to market, the new sorts of expertise they're putting in. Philipp touches on a lot of this and gives a good insight into the foundational technology layer.
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5 min
May 15SAP CTO Philipp Herzig Explains SAP’s Enterprise AI Strategy at Sapphire
Bob Evans speaks with SAP CTO Philipp Herzig from SAP Sapphire in Orlando about SAP’s AI strategy, platform evolution, customer modernization challenges, governance, and enterprise-scale agent deployment. Herzig lays out SAP’s positioning around openness, business AI, autonomous agents, security, and migration support, while addressing confusion around API policy changes and fair-use limits.
SAP’s AI Inflection Point
The Big Themes:
SAP’s AI Platform Is Becoming Cohesive: A major theme in the conversation is that SAP is presenting a more integrated AI vision rather than a collection of disconnected announcements. Herzig describes a layered architecture spanning UX, autonomous assistants, business process orchestration, governance, and the underlying AI platform. The emphasis is on a consistent enterprise AI framework rather than isolated tools.

Migration Support Is Becoming Strategic: Migration is no longer framed as a technical back-office concern. Instead, it's becoming a strategic AI enabler. Herzig discusses SAP’s toolchain investments, including LeanIX, Signavio, migration automation, testing support, code modernization, and agent-assisted implementation. The idea is to reduce friction in modernization so customers can reach AI readiness faster. Instead of treating migration as merely an ERP upgrade journey, SAP increasingly positions it as foundational infrastructure for enterprise AI transformation.

Change Management Extends Beyond Technology: Herzig acknowledges that deploying AI agents is not simply a software problem, it’s an organizational transformation issue. While SAP can accelerate technical deployment through tooling, governance, observability, and automation, customers must still rethink workflows, roles, and operating models. The discussion around developer productivity, AI-assisted coding, and human-agent collaboration reinforces this broader perspective.
The Big Quote: ““There are good agents out there… there’s also a lot of really bad agents out there… and they, of course, set the enterprise system under risk.”
More from SAP and Philipp Herzig:
Connect with Philipp Herzig on Linkedin or learn about SAP Sapphire.
Visit Cloud Wars for more.
16 min
May 14 Inside SAP's AI Revolution: COO Steinhäuser
In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I explore how SAP’s AI Revolution could redefine enterprise software through agents, data, and industry-specific intelligence.
Highlights
00:03 — We are reporting here from the Sapphire show floor in Orlando. It's been a wild week here, and I had a great chance to talk with SAP Chief Operating Officer, Sebastian Steinhäuser about some of the changes that are going on there inside what I call SAP's AI Revolution.
00:21 — Covering everything from what it's doing with agents, how it's redefining their apps, how it's building up its Data Platform, and more. Sebastian offers some great insights into all of that, and we talked about it in a full-length video linked to down below.
01:13 — (Sebastian offers insights about) the rise of data within SAP becoming the foundation for everything, the Business Data Cloud moving into a very powerful area, the Business AI Platform now consolidating some different sort of platforms and technologies that SAP had so that customers can gain more from that more quickly.
02:00 — SAP sees the world, and Sebastian describes this, where there's going to be tens, hundreds of thousands of agents, perhaps millions, you know, a few years out. And certainly SAP is not going to build all of those. So it's going to be the partners that do this.
03:09 — SAP is more focused than ever before on delivering not just code (that happens to be what they make) but what SAP's real focus is: delivering superb business outcomes for customers.
Visit Cloud Wars for more.
5 min
May 14Sebastian Steinhäuser Details SAP’s Autonomous Enterprise Push
At SAP Sapphire in Orlando, Bob Evans sat down with Sebastian Steinhäuser to discuss what may be one of the most consequential strategic shifts in SAP’s history. As enterprise AI moves from experimentation to execution, Steinhäuser outlines SAP’s vision for the autonomous enterprise: where AI agents, assistants, business data, and deep industry expertise come together to solve real operational problems.
AI with Industry Depth
The Big Themes:
Customers Want Outcomes, Not AI Demos: A recurring theme in the conversation is that enterprise leaders are not buying AI for novelty. They want measurable business outcomes. Customers are focused on solving hard operational problems such as improving supply chain resilience, winning in retail execution, streamlining regulated manufacturing, and modernizing enterprise workflows. This reflects a broader evolution in enterprise buying behavior. The AI conversation has moved beyond experimentation into operational accountability.

The Autonomous Enterprise Is SAP’s North Star: SAP’s central narrative at Sapphire is the autonomous enterprise. Steinhäuser describes a future where AI agents and human workers collaborate, with AI taking responsibility for repetitive, process-heavy, and data-intensive tasks while employees focus on higher-value decision-making. This is more than a product launch — it is SAP’s strategic framework for the next phase of enterprise software. The company references hundreds of AI agents and dozens of assistants spanning functional domains. Importantly, SAP is positioning these capabilities as practical rather than speculative.

Ecosystem Scale Will Determine Execution: SAP clearly sees its partner ecosystem as critical to AI transformation at scale. Steinhäuser points to thousands of ecosystem participants at Sapphire and outlines investments designed to accelerate migration, implementation, and AI activation. This reflects enterprise reality: large organizations rarely transform through software vendors alone. Systems integrators, consulting firms, implementation specialists, and migration partners often determine whether transformation succeeds.
The Big Quote: “Building the technology is one thing. Really changing processes, people, and systems to adapt AI, it’s a totally different one."
More from SAP:
Learn more about Sapphire and about Joule Assistants.
Visit Cloud Wars for more.
13 min

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Cloud Wars analyzes the major cloud vendors from the perspective of business customers. In Cloud Wars Live, Bob Evans talks with both sides about these profoundly transformative technologies, and with…