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?”

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:

After sifting through all my notes from sessions, emails, in-person meetings, the blogosphere and twitter, since Monday, here’s my net take on SAP, and the Sapphire event – the detailed version will be available to Saugatuck CRS clients in a Strategic Perspective to be published late tomorrow.

1. SAP's future business builds on HANA; HANA is at least as key to SAP’s future as R/3 was to its past. And the HANA strategy is all about Cloud.
2. SAP is making logical and expected moves to Cloud. Quite a bit of what has been announced or unveiled here at Sapphire has already been seen, expected, or is already in use. What we’re seeing at Sapphire is SAP’s coordinated, strategic position on everything Cloud and everything SAP – and SAP has made it clear that those are one and the same.
3. The breadth and depth of SAP’s Cloud moves, however, are of such magnitude that they could have an effect on how we think of Cloud - similar to the effect that IBM’s entry into desktop/personal computers had on the business legitimacy of PCs and their associated applications and networking.
4. What is most impressive about SAP’s approach to me is SAP’s strong emphasis on getting things done and delivered. A great deal of credit for this goes to Lars Dalgaard and the Successfactors team, which is Cloud-native and business savvy, not to mention driven.
5. But at least equal credit must go to SAP leadership for recognizing the need for change, and for initiating and enforcing change from the top down in a manner that retains and, in cases, increases the value of existing investments by SAP, its customers, and its partners. It cannot have been an easy or simple series of decisions to install and foster the combination of personality, organization, and business approach that so fundamentally alters SAP’s trajectory.

But the bottom line is that SAP’s future is not about some generic or me-too strategy with the word “Cloud” in it. SAP is more “all-in” on Cloud than any other legacy IT provider at this point; company leadership has bet the future on widespread, common, and de facto business use of Cloud in all aspects, from core systems of record to lite mobile interactions. If SAP is to succeed, Cloud must be the core business IT worldwide. Soon. 

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.

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.