#Amazon CEO #JeffBezos doesn't like finishing second--but to be #1 in the cloud, he's got to beef up #AWS 's #PaaS and #SaaS capabilities. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images) (Note: After an award-winning career in the media business covering the tech industry, Bob Evans was VP of Strategic Communications at SAP in 2011, and Chief Communications Officer at Oracle from 2012 to 2016. He now runs his own firm, Evans Strategic Communications LLC.) CLOUD WARS – When Jeff Bezos and Amazon decide to get into a new business, they don't just nibble around the edges—they aim to out-think, out-innovate, out-market and if necessary outspend any competitor standing between Amazon and the #1 spot in that business. Advertisement  So for all of Amazon's remarkable successes in the cloud with its Amazon Web Services unit—including revenue of $4.1 billion and a growth rate of 42% for the quarter ended June 30—I think we've seen only the early phases of what will become a wide-ranging and likely end-to-end approach to the cloud.
- Salesforce.com: I know, I know, Marc Benioff doesn't want to sell and his company is doing just fine as an independent—both points are true. But it's also true that circumstances change, and the SaaS space that Salesforce dominated for so long is now getting increasingly crowded and competitive and contested as Microsoft and Oracle and SAP are all investing massive amounts in their SaaS businesses. Plus, those companies have robust PaaS capabilities on which those SaaS apps can be leveraged, whereas Salesforce's PaaS efforts have been inconsistent. Amazon is already its premier cloud infrastructure partner. Benioff has said he expects Salesforce to reach $20 billion in revenue by 2020, and its current market cap is $65 billion.
- Workday: And yes, you're right again, founders Dave Duffield and Aneel Bhusri have total control over their company's future and they're fiercely independent. But unlike in its early days when Workday was one of the only true SaaS HCM companies out there, the competitive environment today is savage as Oracle and SAP are throwing everything they've got at the HCM business—and that's not trivial because SAP is 10 times as big as Workday, and Oracle's 20 times as big. Amazon is already its premier cloud infrastructure partner. Workday hopes to hit $2 billion in revenue in its current fiscal year, and its market cap is $21 billion.
- Infor. Under CEO Charles Phillips—former Oracle president and Wall Street superstar at Morgan Stanley—Infor has spent the last few years remaking its product lineup from top to bottom, and currently, competes across many of the major SaaS segments. It's also just introduced a dynamic new AI system called Coleman and feels it can compete successfully with its special emphases on industry functionality, beautiful user experience, and deeply embedded AI capabilities. Amazon is already its premier cloud infrastructure partner. Infor's annual revenue is about $3 billion, and some observers said it is valued at $10 billion after the $2.5 billion investment made earlier this year by Koch Brothe
- Splunk. Way ahead of its time with its decade-ago focus on machine logs, Splunk now has world-class technology and expertise in the booming field of machine learning. Amazon could package this expertise with its cloud services as a powerful approach to the data-first and AI-first world that's unfolding. It also would give Amazon a leg into the on-premise world as Splunk operates both in the cloud and on-premise, and it's already an AWS partner. With annual revenue of about $1 billion, Splunk has a market cap of $8.3 billion
- ServiceNow. This one's possible counterintuitive, but it's a red-hot company that, as of right now, doesn't have many direct competitors—and it's expanding into new markets rapidly. Two big assets for AWS: big strength in machine learning and process automation, two capabilities that business customers are demanding from their cloud vendors. Its annual revenue is about $1.5 billion, and its market cap is an eye-popping $18.7 billion.
- Ansys. One of the best-run and most-innovative digital-business companies you might never have heard of, Ansys helps manufacturing companies digitize their operations from design exploration to digital prototyping to digital-twin technology for operations and maintenance. For AWS, Ansys would provide instant credibility in the industrial world and a head start into a big slice of the digital business world. Ansys has annual revenue of about $1 billion, and a market cap of $11.1 billion.
- Informatica. Since going private in 2015 for $5.3 billion, Informatica has carved out a nice position as a data-management expert, a category that's become white-hot with the emergence of digital lifestyles and the attendant imperatives for businesses to undergo digital transformations. This expertise extends into the cloud and could help AWS position itself as not just a commodity player in IaaS compute and storage, but also a highly capable competitor in enterprise-cloud data management. I was not able to find credible citations of revenue for privately held Informatica.
- Red Hat. Another solid if not sexy company that provides a lot of the in-between infrastructure software and services that help customers operate clouds that are secure, productive, and (relatively) easy to manage. Strong in on-premise world as well as the cloud, Red Hat would provide more of the hybrid chops that Amazon needs if it wants to help customers that are on a 5-year or 10-year journey to the cloud. Red Hat posted fiscal-year revenue of $2.4 billion for the 12 months ended Feb. 28 and has a market cap of $17.5 billion.
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