Day Two at Knowledge12 brought me into closer contact with ServiceNow's founder Fred Luddy and CTO Arne Josefsberg, as I sat down after the keynote for one-on-one meetings that brought the company's key strategies into clearer focus. The Luddy keynote was instructive, too, revealing the company founder to be a true techie, who can deploy ServiceNow solutions and program an airline tracking program in real time. However, the most essential message from ServiceNow concerned the importance of the customer.

All three key trends in the ServiceNow portfolio of offerings are the direct outgrowth of customer requests:

For the past five or six years, we have been monitoring the growth of ServiceNow. An early Cloud player in IT Service Management, ServiceNow has steadily and patiently acquired functionality and customers and respectability under entrepreneur and founder Fred Luddy's management. In the past year or so, however, ServiceNow has made a considerable leap.

This year's Knowledge12 user conference is double the size of last year's with nearly 2000 in attendance. What accounts for this? Two key hires, CTO Arne Josefsberg (ex-Microsoft) and President and CEO Frank Slootman, bring market insight and deep experience to ServiceNow that have nicely complemented Fred Luddy's original vision and execution. Let's look closer.

For a variety of reasons, Dell has been seen as a relatively “quiet” firm serving and enabling strategic enterprise IT. The company has been re-inventing itself rather significantly over the past few years, but is rarely one of the first names in the discussions around enterprise IT strategy, stacks, and Cloud.

This week, Saugatuck subscription research clients get a comprehensive look at how and why Dell has been rebuilding and growing, and increasing profitability, while evolving its business model beyond the low-cost, consumer PC space where it began. Key points include the following:

The second day of the Dell Annual Analyst Conference began early Wednesday with breakfast at 7, especially after many in our number were treated to a selection of rather excellent tequilas the night before.

It began with Steve Felice, President, Chief Commercial Officer sharing examples of Dell’s innovative culture (including crowd sourcing and bamboo in packaging), Boomi’s role in the OneWorld Alliance partner integration solution, and the emerging markets story, now accounting for 30 percent of revenues and projected to grow very rapidly. Steve Felice then presented three interesting Dell customers, and more about that shortly.

At the Dell Annual Analyst Conference (DAAC), a very corporate look predominates with oceans of blue suiting, dark ties, black shoes and serious demeanors. The setting is the Four Seasons Austin, a lovely and somewhat formal hotel with more subtle luxury than first meets the eye. Dell, too, had more to say than first met the eye.