A recent research report from BNP Paribas indicates that as the wave of AI applications continues to make waves across global enterprises, even as core global super-cloud giants like Microsoft and Google continue to dominate the software market in the field of artificial intelligence applications, the financial institution still believes that global cloud software leaders ServiceNow (NOW.US) and SAP (SAP.US) will be among the companies with the most "growth resilience" in the global software industry. However, their stock price prospects are expected to be far inferior to those of cloud giants like Microsoft. BNP Paribas maintains a strongly bullish stance on the AI application and cloud computing leader Microsoft (MSFT.US), believing it will be one of the biggest beneficiaries of the AI application wave. BNP Paribas analyst Stefan Slowinski wrote in a report to clients, "We believe the results of an important global enterprise survey from January serve as a cautionary signal for the software industry, reinforcing recent market negativity towards some software stocks." "In contrast, those super-cloud computing companies continue to 'win' in enterprise survey reports. For instance, the overall spending scores for Microsoft, Amazon AWS, and Google Cloud have remained relatively resilient, and public cloud demand has increased significantly, driven by the expanding penetration of AI applications. SAP and ServiceNow stand out due to improved demand," Slowinski stated. Overall, BNP Paribas is more optimistic about large cloud giants (such as Microsoft, Amazon, and Google) continuously benefiting from the AI application wave and public cloud growth trends, while adopting a more cautious attitude towards typical cloud software companies (like ServiceNow, SAP, Datadog). As super-cloud giants are poised to dominate the AI era, BNP Paribas favors Microsoft over traditional cloud software leaders, believing that AI application and public cloud spending will increasingly tilt towards large-scale cloud service providers. The latest enterprise survey shows that companies generally hold a more cautious attitude towards IT spending related to traditional cloud software companies. Analyst Slowinski from BNP Paribas reaffirmed his "Outperform" rating on Microsoft (MSFT.US) stock and maintained his target price at $632; however, the analyst significantly lowered the institution's target price for ServiceNow from a previous bullish target of $186 to $120. As of Thursday's market close, Microsoft's stock price settled at $451.140, while ServiceNow closed at $128.560, highlighting analyst Slowinski's cautious stance on ServiceNow's valuation and stock price prospects, contrasted with his optimistic bullish view on Microsoft. Furthermore, Slowinski expressed significant surprise at the "sudden deterioration in enterprise adoption" for cloud monitoring and cloud data warehousing software companies like Datadog (DDOG.US) and Databricks in the January enterprise survey, especially since these two cloud software companies ranked at the top in the institution's survey from two quarters ago. The enterprise survey report cited by BNP Paribas points out that Microsoft, Amazon AWS, and Google's GCP cloud platform, as key enablers of AI applications and cloud infrastructure, continue to score highly in enterprise software spending surveys. This indicates more resilient spending by enterprise clients on these platforms and a more optimistic willingness for order growth. The report accurately describes ServiceNow and SAP as having relatively solid fundamental resilience and improved demand. However, the wording regarding their future outlook is not as positively growth-oriented as it is for the cloud giants. The substantial target price cut for ServiceNow indicates more cautious pricing for risk assets, with some cloud-native/monitoring companies even showing signs of weakness. Super-cloud giants are expected to continue benefiting from the AI + public cloud wave. These giants serve as the core infrastructure providers for enterprise AI training/inference systems (e.g., Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS, Google GCP's GPU/TPU/AI computing cluster services). BNP Paribas's enterprise spending trend survey reveals that regardless of whether enterprises purchase specific AI application software, spending on AI platform resources remains a core part of the budget. This ensures that super-cloud computing companies like Microsoft benefit more stably during the AI investment cycle. In BNP Paribas's view, enterprise SaaS companies like ServiceNow/SAP do possess customer stickiness and relatively stable revenue growth curves (hence termed "resilient"). However, unlike underlying AI computing resources, their growth is often highly dependent on enterprise IT budget cycles, which are more susceptible to tightening during macroeconomic and geopolitical uncertainty. SaaS profits and future growth paths rely more on adoption cycles across various industries, unlike the "cycle-agnostic" continuous expansion attribute inherent to AI infrastructure or cloud computing PaaS platforms themselves. The three cloud computing leaders—Amazon, Microsoft, and Google—are comprehensively focused on building developer ecosystems for both B2B and B2C application software related to generative AI. Their aim is to significantly lower the technical barriers for non-IT professionals across various industries to develop AI applications, while also providing powerful cloud-based AI computing platforms, particularly cloud-based AI inference computing resources. The latest revenue and profit figures from MongoDB (MDB.US), a core participant in the "Google AI ecosystem chain" that provides database platform services on Google Cloud, which comprehensively exceeded expectations and led to an upward revision of its full-year outlook, echo Google's recently announced larger-scale AI Capex and its more robustly growing cloud computing business revenue. This collectively highlights that large cloud vendors like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon remain in a period of exceptionally high prosperity regarding AI computing infrastructure construction and the demand for AI developer ecosystem platforms on the application side, as well as cloud inference-side AI computing demand. So far this year, the advancement of the Gemini 3 series (with ongoing expansion in ecosystems/applications) and the explosive popularity of Claude in "programming/Agent-style usage" have indeed accelerated the implementation of generative AI on both the B2B (enterprise processes, development, customer service, analytics) and B2C (AI search/recommendation/consumer-oriented agents) fronts. This objectively shifts computing demand further from "training" towards broader inference and online services, thereby significantly elevating the trajectory of prosperity for global cloud computing IaaS infrastructure (AI GPU/AI ASIC accelerators, networking, storage, large-scale data engineering) and complete cloud computing PaaS AI developer ecosystem platforms. Microsoft is scheduled to report its second fiscal quarter earnings after the U.S. market close on January 28. Wall Street analysts generally expect the cloud and AI leader to report earnings per share of approximately $3.92—implying a potential 34% year-over-year increase—and total revenue of approximately $802.8 billion—implying a potential 30% year-over-year increase. ServiceNow will also report earnings after the market close on January 28. Wall Street analysts generally expect the company to report earnings per share of approximately $0.89 and revenue of approximately $3.53 billion—implying a potential 19% year-over-year increase.
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