The Orchestration Layer in Enterprise AI Just Got Named. It Has a Gemini Logo on It.

by Thomas Wieberneit | Apr 27, 2026 | Analysis, Blog |

What Google Cloud Next 2026 actually told us about the titan pecking order Google Cloud Next 2026 wrapped last week. The official version of the story is the one Google wanted you to read: 260 announcements, 1,302 customer use cases, the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, eighth-generation TPUs, a $750 million partner fund, an $240 billion Marketplace backlog. Big numbers. On-message keynote. Tidy “agentic era” framing. The more interesting story is who showed up to validate it, and what Google actually built underneath. Five of the seven enterprise titans I track walked into Las Vegas and announced expanded partnerships that all rest on the same architecture: Gemini Enterprise as the agent control plane, with the titan’s product playing the role of premium ingredient. Salesforce. SAP. ServiceNow. Oracle. Adobe. Add Workday and Palantir Technologies to the picture, both adjacent to my titan list but visibly aligned in the same direction. Two titans were not in the picture. Microsoft, because Copilot is the direct counter-position and Cloud Next is not Microsoft’s stage. Zoho, because Zoho’s stack does not need a Google motion and Zoho’s buyer is not the same buyer. Both absences matter. More about them a little later. What Google actually built Let’s start with the framing. Google did not just ship a model platform with new features. It repositioned Google Cloud from “AI development environment” to enterprise agent control plane. Vertex AI services and roadmap evolutions are now delivered through the new Agent Platform rather than as a standalone product. That is not a naming change, it’s an entirely different playground. The Agent Platform stack now visibly includes: Agent Identity...

Adobe and Magento tie the knot – a great move

by Thomas Wieberneit | May 24, 2018 | Analysis, Blog |

The News On May 21, 2018 Adobe announced that it has entered a definitive agreement to acquire Magento Commerce. The obvious objective of Adobe is to integrate Magento’s commerce capabilities into their own experience capabilities. According to Brad Rencher, executive VP and general manger, Digital experience, with this acquisition Adobe is the “only company with leadership in content creation, marketing, advertising, and now commerce – enabling real-time experiences across the entire customer journey”. Magento Commerce (Magento) is a ”leading provider of cloud commerce” software to merchants and brands. Magento covers both, B2C and B2B vendors. The company is listed as a strong performer for both, b2b- and b2c ecommerce solutions in this year’s Forrester Waves on Commerce Suites. The Bigger Picture Adobe is all about ‘delivering experience’. You should read the second part of friend Paul Greenberg’s recent ZDNet article on Adobe where he explains customer experience, brand experience, and consumable experiences – and where he sees Adobe in this triple – in his uniquely great fashion. A marketing suite like Adobe’s Experience Cloud needs channels into which the insights, that the marketing solution generates, are pushed. The most important one being e-commerce. E-commerce is also the channel that offers most potential. The technology is no more bound to just a commerce web site. The site is just one possible interface. As is a chat bot in Facebook Messenger. As is Alexa. Or Siri. Or Google Assistant. You get the picture. Further, an e-commerce site is not only the foremost channel to send marketing communications to (and to deliver experiences), but also one of the most important input channels...

Clash of Titans – SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, Oracle Quo Vadis?

by Thomas Wieberneit | Oct 11, 2016 | Analysis, Blog |

Following all those announcements of AI, machine learning, IoT, IaaS, PaaS and what not over the past months, I was beginning to wonder where the big business software vendors are going. What is the game plan of Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, SAP? How does newcomer Adobe fit in there? Maybe Amazon and Google, too; or Facebook. It is a time for another Quo Vadis – this time: Quo Vadis, industry? Clash of Titans In the last about 2 – 3 years we have seen a strong acceleration of innovation, or at least talk about it. Cloud computing, offering nearly unlimited scalability and elasticity of computing resources has become main stream. Cloud computing also allows for nearly 100 per cent uptime Since the advent of the iPhone (yes, I know this was earlier than 2013) the proliferation of sensors has increased a lot, resulting in them becoming cheaper and cheaper, allowing for an increasing number of data rich applications This has also driven fast mobile connectivity, which has become nearly ubiquitous; maybe except a few blessed spots on this planet, which will be covered soon, too. Think of Google’s Balloon project or Facebook’s drone Memory has become dirt cheap, and fast In-memory technologies, No-SQL databases, Hadoop, Spark, and improvements of analytics algorithms make it possible to work with huge sets of data in real time The (re-)emergence of AI technologies, progress in machine learning and deep learning, enabled by the now available computing power, help in pattern recognition that allows machine driven suggestion, prediction, and prescription of actions, based upon huge amounts of data Data, be it machine-generated or human created...

Microsoft and Adobe announce a WOW partnership

by Thomas Wieberneit | Sep 27, 2016 | Analysis, Blog |

Today Microsoft and Adobe announced a deep strategic partnership. Adobe will make Microsoft Azure its preferred cloud platform for their Marketing, Creative, and Document Clouds; Microsoft in turn will make Adobe Marketing Cloud its preferred marketing service for the Dynamics 365 Enterprise Edition. Wow! That is a game changer in the CRM world. It takes the other tier one players, especially Salesforce, and Oracle, following their AI announcements, plus SugarCRM, head on. While I expect some AI driven marketing functionality being announced near term the initial benefit is a leading marketing tool being accessible for Microsoft. This partnership is also a blow to Oracles IaaS story as it drives load to Azure where Oracle seems to focus on their existing customer base. Well, and then there is AWS, too … And it should be highly beneficial for both companies. Not talking about the benefits of running on a powerful cloud platform Adobe with Cortana gets access to and likely will be integrated into a leading AI and machine learning platform. Conversely, the so far not too strong marketing functionality in Dynamics CRM gets a significant boost by getting integrated with one of the hottest marketing clouds that are around at the moment. The synergies that can be generated by tightly integrating a powerful real time analytics and AI platform, powerful productivity applications, and a strong marketing platform can hardly be overestimated. This is very good news for Microsoft Dynamics customers once the systems actually are running on a harmonized data model. Till then the prospects are highly exciting. As a result, as per the announcement, customers will be able...