What is Happening?  This week, Saugatuck research executives found themselves participating in three, simultaneous industry events shaping the world of Cloud IT and business. CEO Bill McNee and SVP Bruce Guptill sat down with key executives (including C-level meetings) at SAP Sapphire in Orlando; VP Mike West met with company leaders and users at ServiceNow’s Knowledge12 conference in New Orleans; and VP Charlie Burns took part in IBM’s invitation-only Cloud Innovation Forum in Chicago. It’s been a Cloudy week for Saugatuck, in other words.

The net takeaway from all three events, including dozens of discussions with provider and customer leaders, is that the religious wars and mystery about what Cloud is all about is clearly gone. The critical questions for providers and user enterprises have shifted from “What is it” and “Why should we?” to “When should we?” to “How do we?”

After sifting through all my notes from sessions, emails, in-person meetings, the blogosphere and twitter, since Monday, here’s my net take on SAP, and the Sapphire event – the detailed version will be available to Saugatuck CRS clients in a Strategic Perspective to be published late tomorrow.

1. SAP's future business builds on HANA; HANA is at least as key to SAP’s future as R/3 was to its past. And the HANA strategy is all about Cloud.
2. SAP is making logical and expected moves to Cloud. Quite a bit of what has been announced or unveiled here at Sapphire has already been seen, expected, or is already in use. What we’re seeing at Sapphire is SAP’s coordinated, strategic position on everything Cloud and everything SAP – and SAP has made it clear that those are one and the same.
3. The breadth and depth of SAP’s Cloud moves, however, are of such magnitude that they could have an effect on how we think of Cloud - similar to the effect that IBM’s entry into desktop/personal computers had on the business legitimacy of PCs and their associated applications and networking.
4. What is most impressive about SAP’s approach to me is SAP’s strong emphasis on getting things done and delivered. A great deal of credit for this goes to Lars Dalgaard and the Successfactors team, which is Cloud-native and business savvy, not to mention driven.
5. But at least equal credit must go to SAP leadership for recognizing the need for change, and for initiating and enforcing change from the top down in a manner that retains and, in cases, increases the value of existing investments by SAP, its customers, and its partners. It cannot have been an easy or simple series of decisions to install and foster the combination of personality, organization, and business approach that so fundamentally alters SAP’s trajectory.

But the bottom line is that SAP’s future is not about some generic or me-too strategy with the word “Cloud” in it. SAP is more “all-in” on Cloud than any other legacy IT provider at this point; company leadership has bet the future on widespread, common, and de facto business use of Cloud in all aspects, from core systems of record to lite mobile interactions. If SAP is to succeed, Cloud must be the core business IT worldwide. Soon. 

On Monday May 14, Sage North America introduced its administrative portal for the Sage Exchange payments platform. Late last week, we were briefed on the portal, the platform, and Sage’s strategy by Greg Hammermaster, President of Sage Payment Solutions.

Here’s Sage’s intro to the announcement: “Accessible through the web and mobile devices, Sage Exchange enables small and midsized businesses (SMBs) to view, manage, and connect their payments environment, and gives SMBs consolidated reporting access to their mobile, point-of-sale (POS), e-commerce, and back office merchant account(s) to help them streamline the back office and manage the payments environment. In the future, Sage Exchange will also provide SMBs with an array of connected services, such as international money transfers and business prepaid cards.” The entire announcement and more info on the platform and portal can be found at http://www.sagepayments.com/ http://www.sagepayments.com/">www.sagepayments.com.

Given that the majority of Saugatuck clients today utilize multiple (usually dozens or more) Cloud-based IT and business services, how many have dusted off the SLAs related to those? What we’re finding out from our ongoing SaaS and Cloud IT research programs is that most have not given enough time and thought to viewing and understanding their Cloud IT SLAs. And too many, it seems, have not even negotiated the terms of those SLAs with their providers. That’s bad business for enterprise user/buyer and provider both.

This week, we’re reviewing and updating our original guidance regarding SaaS/Cloud SLA provisions and negotiation, and we strongly recommend that our client do the same. We’ve updated our core Strategic Perspective on the subject, which is being published this week for clients of our CRS subscription service. Here are the five points that every IT and business executive needs to understand and negotiate when it comes to any Cloud service level agreement:

I’ve fielded a handful of questions from clients and media recently regarding what Saugatuck believes will be the outcome and effects of the Oracle lawsuit against Google regarding the use of Java intellectual property within the Android operating system. More calls have come in now that the jury has found that Google “infringed” to some extent, without agreeing on whether or not Google's use of Java was within legally-protected "fair use" guidelines.

In short, everything Android is up in the air, and some enterprise IT and mobility managers are concerned about what effects this court case may have on their abilities to plan and manage Cloud+mobility in the coming months, along with what to do – if anything.