What is Happening?  Last week, Saugatuck attended the Wells Fargo Tech Summit in San Francisco, moderating a panel and meeting with a number of industry leaders. This was the second year that we participated in the conference – which we greatly value as another important window into the dynamics shaping the market for business computing products and services – in this case a Wall Street perspective.

Day 1 of the event was filled with an all-star cast of industry leaders. I especially valued John Chambers (CEO, Cisco) opening keynote, as well as the Consumerization of IT panel, Jason Maynard’s (Wells Fargo’s lead software analyst) fireside chat with Safra Catz (CFO, Oracle) – as well as the panel that I moderated on the Future of IT (with senior executives from Snaplogic, ServiceMesh, Deloitte and Nodeable). One of the highlights of the morning session was a short presentation by Biri Singh (Head of Cloud Services, HP), where he outlined at a high level HPs new holistic Cloud strategy that was subsequently announced this past Tuesday (see Saugatuck’s initial take in our Lens 360 blog post HP Cloud Update: Solid Strategy and a Top-down Mandate, 09Apr2012).

An emerging and disruptive master architecture – combining Cloud, Mobile, Social and Data Analytics plus Integration to on-premises Data Assets – is now forming to enable the Boundary-free Enterprise™ that Saugatuck foresaw in 2008. The Boundary-free Enterprise will not be constrained by organizational boundaries and firewalls, but can enable a new model of work and facilitate new business relationships that are not bound by time or place. Nevertheless, there are new risks and challenges that must be managed for its rewards to be fully realized.

Table 1 - Convergence in the Cloud: 21st Century Organizations, Boundary Free and Global

As the IT discipline around Big Data matures, it will drive businesses to seek answers and value from their own data. We have seen an interest in leveraging this data for competitive advantage. To help our customers do this we have built this simple list of criteria to help judge the value of your data, as well as the likelihood of return on any data initiative conducted with an organization

1. Data Uniqueness – Is the source of the data unique to your organization? Data that is not unique (customer information, for example) might have been collected by your competitors just as easily as by you. For competitive advantage, focus on unique data such as clickstream information to minimize the intrusion of external variables.
2. Data Accessibility – Is your data in the form of log files spread across 50 different webservers? Or is it already nicely formatted, ready for analysis? If huge investment in time and resources is necessary to bring data together for analysis, does the effort outweigh the costs?
3. Data Relevance – Does your data address your specific business problem? Data sources should be examined with a particular business goal in mind. Forcing irrelevant, but available data to suit a problem is a recipe for faulty analysis.

Not all data is created equal, and for many organizations it will be of paramount importance over the coming year to prioritize and evaluate the relevance and quality of the data they have been collected. Though all the data may yield prescient insights into various dimensions of the business, the majority will be more suited to facilitate internal review, rather than drive competitive advantage.

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.

In September 2008, we introduced the Saugatuck Cloud EcoStack™, a model describing five functional layers of the Cloud and their interrelations:

• Level 4 - Cloud Services
• Level 3 - Cloud Business Solutions
• Level 2 - Cloud Platforms
• Level 1 - Cloud Infrastructure
• Level 0 - Cloud Technologies

We’ve just published a Strategic Perspective in which we discuss two key uses of the Saugatuck Cloud EcoStack™, one for vendors to plan their Cloud strategies and identify business opportunities, and one for enterprise IT and users to apply in planning their evolving business solutions portfolios.

Saugatuck research clients might be interested in looking at a research piece just written that delves into the emerging concept of organizational resilience, and aims to build an understanding of this critical area merging risk management with agility.

Resilience is a growing organizational requirement that has come to the fore in recent years as a string of natural disasters have combined with economic issues and changing IT environments to create new treats and new opportunities for survival. This Strategic Perspective looks at resilience in the data center and complements previous work on resilience and the Cloud.

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.

What is Happening?  While there are a number of important software industry trends that ebb and flow through time, the advent of the Cloud is clearly encouraging many technology providers to go vertical and emphasize solutions – as technology decisions are increasingly made at the functional and business unit level (where the underlying technology infrastructure will often be hidden from the buyer). This trend was clearly in evidence at IBMs annual Software Analyst Connect event at the Hilton in Stamford, CT earlier this week – which was entitled “Smarter Software: Driving new capabilities, new markets, new models & new buyers.” To net it down, IBM is increasingly focusing its selling message and product development around customer business objectives, required capabilities and outcomes, rather than on technology products per se.

Saugatuck believes that this broader trend toward business outcomes and vertical go-to-market strategies applies across many software and solution provider categories. For example, recent briefings with offshore outsourcers and system integrators clearly supports this trend (see 987MKTand 988MKT, published 29Nov2011), as well as refreshed go-to market approaches by major application providers such as Infor, who are now emphasizing a vertical market value proposition (thus reducing the complexity of their legacy brands). In the case of IBM, it is clearly putting investment weight (in the form of significant M&A activity) behind this important shift in go-to-market strategy and position, at the same time that it aligns the broad range of internal teams required to successfully support the change in direction.

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).