On November 9, 2012, Saugatuck held its 2^nd annual Cloud Business Summit at the Westin Times Square in New York City. As with our inaugural event, this year’s conference brought together large-enterprise CIOs, CTOs and senior business leaders to explore what is possible, what is real, and what is not in the Cloud today.

In this Featured panel, entitled “Cloud Business Applications and Platforms: A New Paradigm”, Saugatuck founder and CEO Bill McNee leads a discussion focused on where SaaS application demand is headed, the changing role of ISVs and enterprise architecture, and what the platform of the future will look like. The panel also explores the blurring of the lines between the business and IT, and how SaaS is helping to accelerate time to market for many user organizations. Joining McNee on the panel are Colleen Smith, VP at Progress Software, Scott Skellenger, Sr. Director at Illumina, Joe McKendrick, Blogger at Forbes and ZDNet, Ali Shadman, SVP at Infor.

IT and business leaders responsible for making sure that their investments don’t cripple their enterprise’s ability to do business should take a look at Mike West’s latest Strategic Perspective, which introduces Saugatuck’s Risk/Reward Assessment model.

We see this as the first approach to IT assessment that provides both buyers and providers with an objective, truly useful means to identify and then manage challenges in understanding, evaluating, selecting, and managing IT solutions in this new era of the Boundary-free Enterprise^™ and dramatically-altered IT/business master architectures, and the processes and practices needed to cost-effectively manage them.

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:

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.

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.