Saugatuck’s Bill McNee and Bruce Guptill participated in SAPs annual user group conference (SapphireNow) conference this week in Orlando, Florida.

This blog post highlights Bill McNee’s top six takeaways from the event. For a companion blog post, see Sapphire 2012: SAP Betting the Ranch on the Cloud. On Friday, Saugatuck will publish a Strategic Perspective authored by Bruce Guptill that will provide a broader thematic view of what the event may mean longer-term.

Last week, Saugatuck was briefed by Colleen Smith, VP at Progress Software (NASDAQ: PRGS), concerning the firm’s recently announced strategy to refocus around its core OpenEdge product line (see April 25, 2012 Progress Software press release).

Over the past half dozen or so years, Progress had been successfully diversifying the company beyond its historical 4GL and app dev roots, primarily through the acquisition of a number of high-profile BPM, event-processing, middleware and integration-focused assets. This strategy apparently had been working until recently, when top line revenue and operating income began to fall. In response, the firm’s former CEO Richard Reidy stepped down last August – and after a five month BOD search, the firm hired Jay Bhatt as its new President and CEO (formerly of Autodesk) in December 2011.

Earlier this morning I was pleased to deliver one of the Featured Presentations at this year’s All About the Cloud conference, being held at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco – sponsored by the SIIA and OpSource.

Post the conference, I will draft up my thoughts about insights from the event. However, in the meantime, readers and conference attendees can access and download a copy of my presentation by clicking here.

Yesterday, Saugatuck participated in a special hour-long internet-based radio program hosted by VoiceAmerica’s Business Network entitled “In the Cloud with Game-Changers.”

The radio show was recorded and can be accessed at the following link: http://bit.ly/Ip5US7.

The panel focused on a variety of topics and issues related to the Cloud as a Game-Changer, including:

• What is driving Cloud demand (and how are customers gaining value)?

• Cloud as part of the new emerging Master Architecture (Cloud, Mobile, Social and Advanced Analytics, or "CMSA" plus Integration) – driving what Saugatuck is referring to as the Boundary-free Enterprise™

• Challenges associated with security and privacy – how real?

• What are the key strategies that customers are deploying to win in the Cloud?

• Thoughtful predictions relative to Cloud adoption five years forward (2017).

Joining Saugatuck CEO Bill McNee on the panel were Rainer Zinow, SVP at SAP, Kamesh Pemmaraju, Senior Product Manager at Dell, and Dr. Steve Hodgkinson, Research Director at Ovum.

While sponsored by SAP, this was a vendor-neutral radio show.

What is Happening?  Like many mega-vendors, IBM is making serious investments in key trends and technologies driving the new Master IT architecture (Cloud / Mobile / Social / Analytics + Integration – see Research Alert 1054RA, published April 12, 2012), and the emergent Boundary-free Enterprise™. Several of these threads were on display and emphasized at the IBM Impact conference in Las Vegas, which Saugatuck participated in earlier this week – with a major focus around mobility, business integration and the importance of service architectures.

However, the biggest take away from the event for Saugatuck was a greater appreciation for what IBM is doing with its recently announced PureSystems family of integrated technology, and its potential to dramatically lower the costs of deploying, maintaining and managing new private Cloud workloads.