Clients of Saugatuck’s Continuous Research Service (CRS) have been following our work on Collaborative and Social IT since 2008. Over the past several months, Saugatuck clients have been expressing increased interest in our take and guidance regarding Collaborative Commerce – a term that has been popularized by Ariba, but one that we find is widely used throughout IT and business markets. And our just-closed 2012 Business Applications/SaaS user survey indicates that Collaborative Commerce is quickly becoming one of the most compelling types of Cloud-based and hybridized business solutions, in terms of user enterprise interest and investment. In short, we see the initial rise of Collaborative Commerce among leading enterprises, and are moving to make sure that our clients have the most valuable insight and guidance available.

This blog post is to announce that Saugatuck is formalizing the addition/extension of Collaborative Commerce within our Collaborative/Social IT research programs. What this means for our clients is expanded focus, research, analysis and guidance in understanding the whys and wherefores of this increasingly-important, influential, and often-disruptive aspect of IT, including guidance in planning, solution and provider assessment, selection, implementation, and ongoing management for optimization and integration of Collaborative Commerce into daily IT and business operations. In addition to our standard frameworks and guidance, clients will be able to access selection, implementation, and management case studies, as well as insights from our regular briefings with providers - including Ariba, GXS, IBM, Infor, Oracle, SAP and others.

Beginning this month, we will lay out our Collaborative Commerce vision as part of our ongoing CRS Strategic Perspectives. Clients can also expect more detailed analysis and guidance regarding adoption trends, provider and solution insights, and planning guidance in follow-on Strategic Perspective and at least one Strategic Research Report. Check back here in our Lens360 blog for more information on upcoming research.  

Resilience is an important topic for Saugatuck clients, as natural and financial events have struck across the globe. You might be interested in looking at a research piece just written on this issue that examines how organizational resilience is linked to developments in Cloud IT.

Resilience is a growing requirement for organizations. A resilient organization is prepared for disasters of all types, able to respond quickly and creatively, and capable of realizing opportunities in change. Resilience both IT and the organization at large is fostered by Cloud IT. This Strategic Perspective looks at how the Cloud aids in developing resilience.

Resilience and Cloud IT go hand-in-hand, but it is important to bear in mind that this is an evolving relationship. Cloud offerings provide enormous benefits for resilience, but there are also significant caveats. For businesses wishing to develop resilience, Cloud should be a significant contributor to the plan, but it is important to ensure that focus remains upon processes rather than upon technology.

Key Cloud characteristics favoring resilience are:

Risk Management

As part of Saugatuck’s ongoing and growing work in the role(s) of data integration and Cloud (1024RA, Cloud-based Data Integration Changes Business for Enterprises and Providers, 16Feb2012), I had the good fortune to participate this week in Informatica’s annual analyst briefings in Silicon Valley. After two packed days of give and take on Informatica’s vision, strategy, tactics, plans and offerings, it’s fair to say that the company understands where it sits, where their real opportunities are, what their business goals should be, and how to approach and achieve those goals.

Granted, that sounds rather “business as usual.” But that’s what makes Informatica rather unique in a market environment rife with hype about Big Data, Cloud, mobility, social IT, and so on. There’s a company strategy roadmap that was really developed years ago, and which has been tweaked around the edges a few times, but which has remained largely intact and carefully followed as the markets have changed and evolved around it. Informatica does not ignore those market changes, but continually seeks and works to redefine how the market perceives it and its offerings within the latest paradigms. It does not ignore important changes and trends, nor does it pander to them. At its own bottom line, Informatica resolutely remains the same: Focused on data integration.

This means that Informatica finds itself well-positioned to take advantage of the current renaissance of data awareness. We see the company doing so very pragmatically and matter-of-factly. For example: The Informatica Cloud offering, which we reckon to be the fastest-growing and apparently the most profitable group within Informatica because it follows an almost ingeniously practical sales strategy: Sell to partners that have already educated and sold prospects on Cloud-based, data-generating, business applications that could be made more beneficial to the customer via data integration. It’s like selling napkins to diners at a rib restaurant.

Though its vision is clear, Informatica has room to improve in many areas. For example, they have a spot-on vision of how and why mobility is generating some revolutionary uses of data for business – but still have a ways to go when it comes to articulating their mobility data integration value proposition for enterprise IT. Another example: While useful and valuable, the Informatica Cloud offering right now can be considered “table stakes,” a first layer in what should be a growing stack of Cloud-based data integration services, including eventual offerings of integration-as-a-service embedded in Cloud platforms and/or SaaS applications. But the current entry is more than adequate for what the vast majority of likely and potential users could benefit from at this point in time.

Saugatuck’s net take on the company and its event: Data integration ain’t glamorous, and INFA ain’t trying to make it so. There’s no hype, no glitz, just figuring out how and where the company delivers value through customer’s use of data. Therein lies one of Informatica’s greatest challenges: The value of data.

What is Happening? This week Informatica, The Data Integration Company, held an invitation-only, two-day conference for a select group of industry analysts at a hotel near the company’s Redwood City, California headquarters. While Saugatuck’s head of research, Bruce Guptill attended the full program of conference events, I conducted an interview with two senior executives at the information management company on the subject of data quality, data governance and the Cloud.

Full Disclosure: More than twenty five years ago, I managed data administration at John Hancock and later at Fidelity Investments, founded the Boston chapter of the Data Administration Management Association (DAMA) and was deeply involved in the issues of data quality and data governance in a number of vendor user conferences, including IBM GUIDE.

Not only are these issues not new, the challenges have grown ever more complex with the proliferation of architectures and devices. What was once a problem in the context of mainframes and departmental minicomputers has spiraled into increasing complexity with the PC, client/server, the Web, mobile devices and now Cloud-based data solutions.

Why is it Happening?  In speaking yesterday with Ravi Shankar Devaraj, Senior Director, Product Marketing, and Dennis Moore SVP & GM of the Master Data Management business unit at Informatica, I learned the following:

The issue of data quality is considered a very high priority in their client base for two primary reasons:

On Thursday, February 16^th, I spent the day at the SIIA Cloud/Gov conference in Washington, DC. The event had a strong turnout (150-200 attendees), with some good buzz in the halls. I was fascinated by the range of Cloud deployment that is occurring across the government, with the panels and keynotes painting a picture of accelerating adoption up and down the Cloud Ecosystem ™ stack. This included a wide range of SaaS deployments, public and private cloud infrastructure (moving existing workloads, as well as deploying new workloads), growing use of PaaS (such as by the DOD) . . . as well as a variety of business process management capabilities.

As the keynote David McClure (from GSA) emphasized, the Federal government is facing a perfect storm of tight budgets, new technology and a new generation of CIOs that are poised to take advantage of the Cloud. This clearly mirrors what is happening in the private sector (see Lens 360 blog post CIO Insight: Importance of Cloud in IT Strategies/Plans Growing). McClure emphasized that some of the key challenges associated with the Cloud still need to be resolved (security/privacy, and release of data), but likewise shared that the recently released GSA framework for contracting in the Cloud via FedRAMP is steadily evolving, including the recent addition of 45 controls to FISMA Moderate. This will clearly help further accelerate adoption across the Federal government, and overcome some of the procurement challenges that have existed in support of the Cloud-First policy published in early 2011.

I especially enjoyed the Federal case study panel moderated by Greg Gianforte, CEO of RightNow (with panelists representing the Department of Agriculture, Forge / DISA, and the Department of Education). Wes Lloyd of the Department of Agriculture explained how his agency has transformed a legacy modeling / simulation application via the use of a private cloud – with dramatic improvements in response time.

In a State and Local government panel that I moderated, Garrison Gladfelter, from the PA Department of Health shared how its’ core (legacy) Drug and Alcohol tracking application provided by Kit Solutions has been transformed by Cloud-enabling it, and ultimately turning what was once a proprietary on-prem solution into a shared service that other states can leverage. Our other panelist, Mike Goodrich, from the Arlington Economic Development agency, shared his successful use of the Salesforce CRM offering, across a range of business development and visitor management needs. Goodrich emphasized how the Salesforce engine has become the core master database for the agency, with high productivity and significant cost savings.

Other contributors to the conference included Dawn Leaf from NIST, who was recognized by CloudNow as one of the Top Women in Cloud Computing in America. I especially enjoyed Jason Bloomberg’s presentation on “The Enterprise Context for Cloud Computing” – where he provided some sound (and practical) advice around the need to re-architect your applications to take advantage of the Cloud’s many benefit (especially in regards to elasticity and fault tolerance), as well as the need to build a solid business case as agencies embark on their Cloud journey. I’ve enjoyed reading the Zapthink blog over the years, and didn’t realize the firm had been acquired by Dovèl Technologies.