Martin Casado

The thing about data in the context of business is it is always born somewhere else.

It's always born in systems of record like Salesforce, like Workday, like SAP.

And even if it's your own applications data, if you're a software company and you run your own database, the data is born in that database.

And since, as I said, time immemorial, businesses have had the need for internal use to centralize a copy of all their data in another location.

It doesn't work to just go and do all of your reporting and ask all your questions in each system individually.

Some kinds of questions require you to look across the entire system.

And so that is not new.

However, these AI agents are new, and there has been, in the last year, a reaction, which really started with the stock market.

As we saw the SaaSpocalypse happen, and as we saw the stock prices of all of these systems of record that I'm talking about plummet, people viewed them as under threat from AIs.

We have seen some of these companies start to think that a great strategy for dealing with AI might be to lock it out.

Yeah.

and to say your data is our data now and you can't take it elsewhere.

And if you want to use AI on it, you have to use the AI tools that we provide.

Notably, just a couple of weeks ago, SAP announced a new API policy that literally said all AI agent access was banned, except in a way specifically approved by SAP.

Now, if you're an SAP user, don't panic.

This is just a policy.

You have contracts with SAP.

Those are authoritative as to what you are and are allowed to do.

So don't overreact to these policy memos.

But it just shows how extreme the reaction of some of these companies has been.