What is Happening? — In last week’s Research Alert, we noted the following: The pace of Cloud-driven business innovation is outstripping even the accelerating pace of IT innovation – and therefore is outpacing the abilities of established IT and business management organizations and structures (1138RA, Cloud Business Summit 2012 – The BfE Comes to NYC, 01Nov2012).

Our core warning to enterprises (and to the IT providers serving them): Increasing complexities and costs of doing business and managing IT, in a time when Cloud promises to help organizations and leaders deliver exactly the opposite.

One interesting and fun aspect of the upcoming 2012 Cloud Business Summit event in NYC is the debut of Saugatuck’s Beacon Awards for business innovation. More information on the Awards is available on the Cloud Business Summit site, but we want to take some time and space here to introduce and explain the Awards, the nomination process, and the Award criteria.

The Beacon Awards are about the use of technologies in innovative ways to improve, drive, or create business in four areas of business and IT:

What is Happening? — Earlier this week, Saugatuck hosted its inaugural Cloud Business Summit (see Note 1) in New York City, an invitation-only conference that brought together 125 senior business strategists and technology executives’ from large enterprises to explore what is possible, what is real, and what is not in the Cloud today. This Research Alert summarizes highlights and key takeaways from each session. Future Saugatuck research publications will provide further depth of analysis and guidance developed for, and derived from, the Cloud Business Summit. In addition, Saugatuck readers should be on the lookout for YouTube video highlights from the event sessions within the next couple of weeks that will be published on Saugatuck’s YouTube Channel.

Why is it Happening? — The Cloud has begun its unstoppable spread into all aspects of business, for IT and business strategists, business executives and users, and IT providers. Its impact is already huge, and yet largely unknown. That makes planning for and managing Cloud IT critically important even while its potential and costs are still being explored.

Saugatuck CEO Bill McNee and I participated in this week’s IBM Cloud Forum in San Francisco, two days of one-on-ones and focused sessions with IBM’s Cloud leaders and strategists, including IBM SVP and Group Executive Steve Mills, GTS SVP Erich Clementi, Middleware SVP Robert LeBlanc (who will be speaking at Saugatuck’s  May 10 Cloud Business Forum in NYC), Software Solutions SVP Mike Rhodin, VP of Cloud Technology and Client Innovation Lauren States, LotusLive/Collaboration Solutions VP Sean Poulley, Cloud Services VP Jan Jackman, Enterprise Initiatives VP Mike Hill, and Cloud Security CTO Harold Moss. We also met with IBM SmartCloud clients selected for the occasion.

The bottom line? IBM is being careful to pursue an incremental approach that effectively rolls out Cloud offerings piece by piece, step by step, mapping them to IBM’s existing portfolio, business strategy, and sales/marketing approach. In sum, IBM is selling Cloud the way it has sold IT for decades: Focusing on what is has and what it knows, selling to the buyers with whom it is the most comfortable.

It’s not just better, faster, cheaper that makes the Cloud so attractive.  It’s what you can do with it.  New stuff, like spanning geographies, melting time zones like butter on a hot stove.  The Cloud brings entirely new capabilities to a business, as Kamesh Pemmaraju observes in his blog post on Sandhill.com.

The past few weeks at Saugatuck we’ve been having business discussions with a company in India, hours and hours away. As we’re waking up with a cup of coffee, they are heading home from work. But with Web collaboration tools, we can be sharing documents, making plans, and moving our businesses ahead.  And collaboration is just one of the powerful and unique features of the Cloud. Bill McNee’s opening keynote at the Cloud Business Summit on May 10 in New York will bring into focus how the Cloud is helping to transform businesses and drive new revenue through the creation of Cloud‐enabled business services.  And he is joined at the Summit by business and IT leaders like Rick Nucci, Founder and CTO, Dell Boomi, Christopher Perretta, Executive Vice President, Chief Information Officer, State Street Corporation, James Powell, Executive Vice President and CTO, Thomson Reuters, Ellen Shepard, CIO, Teach for America, Evangelos Simoudis, Managing Director, Trident Capital, and Michael Wilens, President, Corporate Operations and Technology, Fidelity Investments.