What is Happening? While interest and hype surrounding Cloud-based analytics and BI solutions today are ahead of today’s actual rate of adoption, adoption is about to catch up to and pass the hype level.

Saugatuck’s 2012 research and analysis shows that, as of YE 2011, only about 13 percent of enterprises worldwide – including all industries and all sizes of enterprises – indicated that they had Cloud-based BI/advanced analytics solutions in place and in use.

On 11 July, 2012, Saugatuck attended participated in a briefing hosted by Laura Voglino, VP of Routes Transformation, in IBM’s Systems and Technology Group. The focus of the briefing was on IBM’s progress in securing independent application solution providers as business partners for their PureSystems family of offerings.

What is Happening - As part of our ongoing Executive Insights research program, Saugatuck’s Bill McNee and Mike West recently caught up with Paul Daugherty, Chief Technology Architect at Accenture. Published originally as a 2-part set of deliverables in our CRS-CLS research service, we thought that our ongoing non-subscriber readers would value many of the insights and take-aways from this interview, which we have condensed into one 7-page abridged Research Alert.

Daugherty offers a range of insightful views regarding the key issues that large enterprise CIOs are currently grappling with, accelerating investments focused on driving business innovation, managing risk and reward, and key trends in the services business. The interview then turns to the evolution of enterprise architecture, the rise of hybrid cloud, the shift toward Cloud adoption of core-systems of record over time, CMSA and the Boundary-free Enterprise™, and guidance for IT and business execs as they begin their journey to the Cloud.

What is Happening?  On Monday, July 2 2012, Dell Computer announced its planned purchase of Quest Software for $2.4 billion. Quest had been reported in talks with several potential buyers since at least the first quarter of this year.

In its announcement, Dell said that it plans to establish Quest as the core of Dell’s software group, which it expects to grow into a $2 billion-a-year business over the next three years – a planned total revenue growth of about 500 percent based on Dell’s current software business.

Cloud Enablement Offerings can significantly reduce the time, the investment, and the risk of selecting, adopting, and managing a Cloud offering. Saugatuck has just published, for subscription research customers, an updated framework categorizing Cloud Enablement Offerings. This update defines a new category of Cloud Enablement Offerings and describes how one stage in our original Cloud Management Lifecycle has evolved.

This framework should be utilized by IT organizations to help identify the potential impacts of Cloud Enablement Offerings and the resulting impacts on any plans to adopt a Cloud solution. Further, the Cloud Management Lifecycle helps illustrate that it is crucial to integrate the management of the Cloud within a cohesive, seamless IT service value chain and strategy…Cloud-based solutions and workloads must not be separately or “silo” managed.