Holger Mueller has the tricky job of deciphering the future performance of a car while it moves at 140 miles per hour down the technology highway. That’s the nature of the cloud industry, which has seen a constant stream of new product offerings, shifting customer needs and key acquisitions.

Take the headline-making purchase of Slack Technologies Inc. by Salesforce.com Inc. in December, and it’s up to Mueller (pictured), vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research Inc., to make sense of it all.

“Traditionally, Salesforce has always been about sales,” said Mueller. “Service revenue overtook sales revenue last year. Salesforce is now a platform company, and Slack just gives them more revenue and volume to maintain their sky-high valuation.”

Mueller spoke with Dave Vellante and John Furrier, co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during theCUBE on Cloud event. They discussed Oracle Corp.’s competitive position, the decision by Amazon Web Services Inc. to facilitate links between cloud and on-premises workloads, the evolving influence of software-as-a-service-based models and what the future holds for cloud.

Keeping database customers

One of Salesforce’s longtime competitors is Oracle Corp., which watched Salesforce exceed it in market capitalization for the first time in 2020. Nevertheless, Oracle remains in a strong position within the enterprise cloud world, according to Mueller.

“Oracle always has a shot to stay in the game as long as they don’t lose their database customers,” Mueller said. “Oracle is doing a really good job on the database; there are positive things happening. Everything converges on the Oracle database, while Amazon is on the specialized route.”

Mueller sees a careful calculation by AWS in its decision to bridge its cloud infrastructure with on-premises data centers through the introduction of Outposts two years ago.

“Amazon is catching up on the next-gen compute platform, which allows movement of workloads between data centers and the public cloud,” Mueller said. “Essentially, Amazon is in the hardware business. They’re carefully figuring out how much of the cloud they want to run.”

Leveraging SaaS to lower cost

Along with strategic moves among the major cloud platforms, software-as-a-service models emerged as both a key trend and important force for the enterprise world moving forward. Gartner has projected that SaaS solutions will generate $105 billion in revenue for 2020 alone.

The focus many companies must make is on leveraging SaaS to lower costs, and much of that may depend on what cloud platform the SaaS vendor resides, according to Mueller.

“The ability of a SaaS vendor to reduce costs for customers is very important,” Mueller said. “What cloud is my SaaS vendor on? Not every cloud is the same.”

In assessing the roadmap for cloud over the next five years, Mueller believes that artificial intelligence and machine learning will play a critical role.

“We’ll see much more deep learning capabilities,” Mueller said. “I want software to look at my 20 blog posts and write another for me.”

Here’s the complete discussion, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of theCUBE on Cloud event:

Photo: SiliconANGLE