Cloud Wars Live with Bob Evans

In this special episode of Cloud Wars Live, Bob Evans speaks with Manish Sood, founder and CEO of Reltio, about the rapidly changing relationship among enterprise data, AI, and business strategy following SAP’s acquisition of Reltio. Sood explains why trusted, interoperable data is becoming increasingly important as enterprises embrace agentic AI and autonomous business processes. He also discusses why AI models themselves may increasingly become commoditized, how organizations can bridge legacy and next-generation technology, and the ideas behind his new book, Agentic Intelligence: Strategy at the Speed of Data.

Data Powers Agentic AI

Data Becomes the Differentiator: Sood argues that enterprises should stop viewing data simply as another asset and instead recognize it as an interoperable asset that becomes more valuable as it is put to work across the organization. This distinction becomes particularly important as AI capabilities spread. If businesses eventually gain access to broadly comparable AI models, competitive differentiation will increasingly come from proprietary enterprise knowledge: decades of customer information, operational history, relationships, and business context.

AI Creates Unavoidable Urgency: Enterprise transformation once proceeded at what Sood describes as a relatively organic pace. AI has fundamentally changed that dynamic by creating an enormous pull on organizations to move more quickly. Executives might still feel uncertainty about AI, but another fear has become even stronger: getting left behind. That competitive pressure is creating urgency around experimentation, investment, and execution. Sood sees this as potentially healthy because it forces organizations to reconsider technology and processes that previously seemed difficult to change.

Strategy Still Beats Shiny Objects: AI's extraordinary pace doesn't eliminate the fundamentals of good business strategy. Sood notes that every major technology cycle produces a new "shiny object" that organizations race to adopt, sometimes before determining the architecture, strategy, and business value required to make it useful. AI shouldn't become another example. Enterprises absolutely need to embrace the technology, but Sood argues that they cannot sacrifice disciplined thinking about what they are trying to accomplish. That idea sits at the center of Agentic Intelligence.

The Big Quote: "Our thesis has always been that data is not just an asset. Data is the interoperable asset that needs to be used.”

More from Manish Sood and Reltio:

Follow Manish on LinkedIn and learn more about Reltio and SAP at the following links: Reltio: Agentic AI Readiness Research, SAP Business Data Cloud, and Reltio: Building a Foundation for Agentic AI

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Highlights

00:12 — Today's topic is going to be agentic reasoning loops. Everyone's moving to this concept where we can have a planning, act, observe, and reflect type of process, which allows us to be able to get much deeper analysis and much more resilient implementations across AI, across the world.

01:03 — Now, the other thing is with this, we're seeing that about 33% of enterprise software will run on this kind of approach by 2028. Also, the other part of this is that because these different loops are taking place, we're actually seeing that tokens are going to get more and more consumption happening off the back end.

01:38 — So one of the driving factors of this is going to be the increase that we're seeing, and just to give you perspective of what we're starting to see, it's about a 17x on a single chapter that we're starting to see happen as a result of this. So what it used to do when we just did simple RAG patterns.

02:01 — Now we're seeing about 17 times the amount of tokens being consumed, and when we start seeing that level of token consumption, we're going to see that while we're getting better answers, there's also going to be a higher cost that's associated to it.

02:28 — But it doesn't matter that the tokens are necessarily coming down in cost because of the fact that what we used to see is that an average transaction would be about three cents, and now we're seeing it move to about 15 cents across the board, and so this is going to be one of those things that we really need to be thinking about as you start to build out your solutions.

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In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I explore Oracle’s major $7 billion Pentagon contract and what it means for the company’s government and enterprise ambitions.

Highlights

00:03 —The Pentagon has awarded Oracle a major 10-year contract worth up to $7 billion, sending the company's shares around 3% higher in extended trading. On the news, investors are clearly happy to see another major government win here for Oracle.

00:22 — The agreement will see Oracle's software deployed across on-prem data centers used by the U.S. military, intelligence agencies, and Coast Guard. But the contract covers far more than just software licenses. It also includes long-term maintenance, technical support, and consulting services, which will ultimately provide Oracle with a steady stream of recurring revenue over the next decade.

00:50 — This deal is also pretty significant in the wider Cloud Wars and shows how Oracle's ongoing investment in its OCI platform is helping it win these really high-profile enterprise and government contracts.

01:05 — And also for customers, really its enterprise customers, this contract is a really important endorsement of Oracle's technology and its ability to support some of the world's most challenging and sensitive IT environments, and crucially, at a massive scale.

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In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I analyze the extraordinary RPO growth at Microsoft, Oracle, Google Cloud, and AWS and what it signals about AI demand.

Highlights

00:03 — We've got another example here where, in the greatest growth market the world has ever known, we are working with some big numbers that put the law of big numbers to the test here. So, if you look at the four hyperscalers, and I go in order of the size of their backlog or RPO, you've got Microsoft, Oracle, Google Cloud, and AWS.

00:29 — So this is fully committed business. It's fully contracted and not yet recognized as revenue. So this is what's coming down the road, to look into the pipeline, in the future, these companies have — this isn't some guesstimate of what they hope they'll get. This is signed, contracted business. So this is one of the factors, probably the key factor, behind why you see these CapEx numbers approaching or exceeding $200 billion.

01:09 — Now that has led to a couple of these companies entering into the debt markets to try to fund this data center expansion and all that enormous CapEx outlay that they've got to go through. In turn, a couple of these companies for a quarter or two had negative cash flows, and that's got some people on Wall Street unable to comprehend it. The world's coming to an end. What are we going to do?

01:46 — I think the perspective is being switched here, right? Traditionally, the idea is bad. You don't want to have negative cash flow. Okay, that's pretty basic. I think we got that. The difference is there have never been a market with a size, a total addressable market , anything like this, growing at the rate this is. Look at these latest numbers for the four hyperscalers.

02:23 — Oracle, off a much smaller revenue base, has this huge future business coming in: $638 billion in RPO, growing at 363%. Google Cloud had a huge jump this past Q2, $514 billion in backlog, up 390%, and a resurgent AWS posted its biggest backlog number ever, $496 billion, and I believe that growth rate of 154% for its backlog is much higher than any they've reported over the last five or six quarters.

04:07 — So I think it's significant, but I also think it's being vastly overblown. I just want to say one more time: $2.3 trillion. Now, that's not like a TAM figure. Somebody's saying, "Oh, we think the market for new scooters is going to be $2.3 trillion." These are four companies, just four , not the whole tech industry, and these are their signed, contracted, committed figures for what they've got in their backlog or RPO.

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In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I compare Google Cloud, Microsoft, and AWS to reveal which hyperscaler is winning the most new business.

Highlights

00:15 — While all of them had terrific quarters, I'd have to rate it this way: Google Cloud was far and away the best. AWS had a terrific quarter, especially for the way it had been performing before that. Microsoft, at its phenomenal size, had a very good quarter. It's just not growing as quickly, not winning as much new types of business in that way, as the other two.

01:44 — So we had Microsoft go from $54.5 billion to $59.3 billion. So it added $4.8 billion in new revenue in Q2. For Google Cloud, $20 billion to $24.8 billion; it also added $4.8 billion. AWS, $37.6 billion to $42.2 billion. It added $4.6 billion.

02:32 — Yet Google Cloud gained as much new revenue last quarter as Microsoft did, and Google Cloud gained more new revenue than AWS did. So we find that the mix of products and services, the fit to what businesses need right now, Google Cloud is matching what Microsoft's doing, matching or exceeding what AWS is doing. So the size differential is becoming less significant now.

03:27 — What we see with this analysis of the numbers is that Microsoft is not continuing to extend that size differential. The others are chopping into that, and particularly for Google Cloud, at this size and with its growth rate, we see that happening. So, you know, how is this possible? And I think it all comes down to this notion of, you know, the customers have a terrific set of choices here.

05:02 — But in terms of — you look right here, right now — the new business that Google Cloud is winning, they are matching or beating their competitors here, and I think we're going to see that continue with the momentum that Google Cloud has.

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