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?”

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.

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.

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.

Earlier today Saugatuck Technology participated in an Analyst briefing with Workday. Find below some key takeaways from the briefing:

Mobility – this is clearly a key area of focus going forward, given accelerating adoption of iPhones and iPads among senior executives / managers in Workday’s client base. Workday identified a significant number of enhancements in support of smart phones and tablets. Among them, they are now beginning to leverage HTML5 for interface development – which will potentially serve as the backbone for cross-platform tablet support (i.e., Apple, Android).

What is Happening?  As the emerging Master Architecture takes shape, enabling the Boundary-free Enterprise™ with solutions that free the mobile knowledge worker and executive from their desks and build on the Cloud, as well as other capabilities (such as social/collaboration, data analytics and integration), will stimulate business innovation through synergies of value.

According to a current article in the trade press, a new study from the Pew Internet & American Life Projectand Elon University, indicated that by 2020, the majority of U.S. consumers will use smartphones to pay for goods and services. While we believe this is an exciting development, Saugatuck regards the real interest in this trend to be in the way in which mobile payments will become a part of the emerging master Architecture and enable business innovation in the Boundary-free Enterprise™.

What is Happening?  Acquisition of SaaS and other Cloud-based IT and business services has always differed across the globe, due to factors such as relative market maturity, average business size, and state of the economy. We first pointed this out in 570RA A Slice of SaaS: Worldwide Channel Preferences Show Mainstream Trends 04Mar2009.

Since that time, the differences have become more pronounced, with initial preference shifting rapidly over the past few years to more broad types/groups of sources.

Saugatuck clients will be interested in this Perspective which re-examines the high rate of growth in Cloud IT within the Asia/Pacific region. This growth provides important indications as to how Cloud will develop elsewhere, as well as providing opportunities for international vendors to escape the doldrums of sluggish economies in the West. Here, we follow up on our projections from earlier research and look at emerging opportunities.

Key drivers of Asian Cloud developments include:

Recently-published Saugatuck research provides Saugatuck’s Cloud vendor clients with TCO considerations and suggestions for accelerating Cloud adoption. In addition various factors are explained for users to consider when evaluating potential costs of Cloud offerings. These factors include:

• Average utilization of the Cloud infrastructure
• Economies achievable by large Cloud providers
• List prices versus negotiated discounts for large/aggregated workloads

Our research has shown that users do not consistently consider these factors during evaluations and consequently do not gain an accurate projection of the costs of Cloud offerings.

Saugatuck clients concerned with their abilities to see and manage the increasingly-rapid pace of technology, business, and market change should read our latest Strategic Perspective on the phenomenon known as “Cloud speed” (link here).

At its heart, “Cloud speed” is an expression of, and an effect of, the accelerating pace of continuous innovation in IT and business that enables and is enabled by Cloud IT and Cloud business.

On February 24, 2012, Saugatuck met with Cloud infrastructure provider SoftLayer about their Infrastructure platform, as well as their perceptions on the evolving market for Cloud infrastructure.

SoftLayer provides a proprietary Cloud infrastructure platform that includes a wide variety of hosting options which range from small virtual machines running a wide selection of hypervisors (Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix, Parallels, and VMware) all the way to dedicated hardware. All of their options are sold as services with virtual machines available hourly and dedicated hardware available in monthly installments. These machines are all linked, regardless of their location in any of SoftLayer’s 13 datacenters, by a Global Private Network. This allows every machine to treat every other machine on the network as if they are in the same physical rack if the application calls for it. Additionally, SoftLayer has made strong efforts to be SSAE16 and PCI compliant, and currently has customers who are running HIPAA workloads.

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.

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.

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.

What is Happening?   Saugatuck SVP Bruce Guptill has returned from three days at IBM Lotusphere, including the IBM Connect sub-event devoted to social business IT. Among Guptill’s goals for the trip were to test the extent of IBM’s emergent SmartCloud positioning, and to probe IBM’s increasing emphasis on social business, including insights and evidence of how customers are adopting and using it, and what benefits those customers are realizing.

As regards SmartCloud, IBM has developed and is delivering solid and consistent articulation of a still-improving cross-offering, cross-technology, cross-application platform approach to enable and deliver Cloud-based software and business services. While technology and service holes exist in the overall portfolio, and wrinkles remain to be worked out regarding interoperabilities and integration, IBM is one of the few vendors, especially Master Brands, with a coherent and viable strategy in this manner.

I just returned from SIIA All About Mobile (#AllMob) in San Francisco, which ended up being a very informative event.  I chaired a very interactive and informative panel with Bill.com COO Mark Orttung andZuora Marketing VP Jeff Yoshimura on the present and future of Mobile Payments. Saugatuck premium CRS subscribers will see a Strategic Perspective write-up of that panel, along with an additional in-depth write-up of the entire All About Mobile event, later this week.

In this post, I’d just like to share a few highlights from the event that we think bear further investigation as indicators of what looks to be massive-scale growth and disruption enabled by mobile IT within the next year to three years:  

What is Happening?   One indication of the growing use and impact of Cloud – from PaaS to IaaS to SaaS to BPaaS – is the growing concern among IT and business leaders regarding Cloud’s overall and long-term costs. Saugatuck routinely handles a stream of inquiries from user and provider organizations regarding Cloud TCO.

Earlier this month, Saugatuck’s Bill Kirwin and Bruce Guptill participated in a webinar that explained the key drivers of TCO and ROI for Cloud IT. Sponsored by Dell Computer, the webinar provided insights into Saugatuck’s Cloud TCO model, and guidance for business and IT leaders. The webinar gave us a chance to revisit and further explain key insights and guidance from previously-published research on what Cloud TCO really is, and how it can be managed effectively (956CLR, A Framework for Cloud IT Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), 29Sept2011 – non-subscribers to Saugatuck’s CRS-CLS service can access the report here).

Most readers of business and IT media are well aware by now of the 1500-word memo/blog post from Cisco CEO John Chambers to its employees (and of course to the world).

His net: “We’ve lost our way and need to improve for shareholders and customers; our core strategy is sound but our ability to execute has suffered; and there is going to be disruption and pain before we make things work better.”