What is Happening?  As Saugatuck has been reporting for some time now, there is an historic change underway, building on the foundations of the Cloud transition. 2012 was perhaps the most dramatic year in ISV-to-Cloud and pureplay-Cloud startup activity, and the catalyst for this was the growth of Mobile, Social and Analytics platforms driving the evolution of the Boundary-free Enterprise^TM.

Why is it Happening? We have witnessed, and continue to witness, the shift from On-premises data processing to the Cloud and Hybrid-Cloud platforms that drive SaaS, PaaS and IaaS. We know Enterprise buyers have clearly indicated their preferences for deploying these Cloud and Hybrid solutions, and there appears to be a convergence of Cloud and Hybrid Cloud into a single buying and deployment preference (See Figure 1 – Cloud, Hybrid and On-premises Deployments: Note Cloud and Hybrid Convergence).

While the words “Big Data” seem to be on everyone’s lips these days, and even the Wall Street Journal is getting into the act, companies like Informatica live and breathe daily in the rarified air of today’s data analytics.

Of course they are not alone. Many other companies, from startups (e.g., 1010 Data, CloudEra, Platfora, Sensitel, Splice Machine) to established players (Fusion-io, Pentaho, SAS Institute, Teradata) to master brands (Amazon, Dell, EMC, HP, Google, IBM, Microsoft,Oracle, SAP, Workday) are playing this tune. While many startup companies leverage established, but complex Big Data tools like HADOOP, others offer solutions that address traditional analytics as well as Big Data, e.g., Pentaho.  Still other companies, like Splice Machine, make traditional analytics tools work with Big Data. Yet others, startups naturally, innovate with information leverage, based on Big Data, and provide information services. CoreMobile delivers a smart, location-aware information assistant. Inrix tracks traffic patterns to make the morning and evening commutes more manageable. Rest Devices sells “onesies” with embedded sensors to track babies’ breathing.

On Tuesday, March 26, Saugatuck’s Alex Bakker and Mike West joined Bill.com in an SIIA webcast on the rapidly-evolving Cloud category of Mobile Financial Management. Cloud-based financial applications are helping businesses streamline the process of paying bills, projecting cash flow, and conducting business transactions. And it is no secret that companies are taking the next step to deliver these solutions via mobile devices in order to help executives manage their businesses – anytime and anywhere.

Among the timely and urgent topics Saugatuck covered in this highly-informative Webcast were:

Adoption of Cloud IT offerings began and remains mostly based on the attraction of reduced infrastructure costs. Not surprisingly, the trade press and IT analysts provide considerable guidance on selection of Cloud offerings. However, ongoing conversations with users have shown that simply selecting a Cloud infrastructure offering does not ensure maximum ongoing savings.

Saugatuck recently published a Strategic Perspective which focuses on four factors which heavily influence the ongoing costs of running a workload on a Cloud infrastructure:

What is Happening?  What makes Cloud IT and Business work to competitive advantage is innovation – innovation in how and where these technologies and services are used to enable new and better ways of doing business, and to enable entirely new businesses.

Innovation, however, can be very difficult to define, and even more difficult to take advantage of, especially in an IT and Business environment that is constantly changing at an accelerating pace. The ability to identify, isolate, and then address specific technological and business improvement opportunities and needs becomes more challenging when the sheer pace and volume of change makes it difficult to see and understand what is happening and what is possible (1044MKT, Defining “Cloud Speed” and its Impact on IT and Business, 23Mar2012; and 892RA, Switched-on: Cloud IT is Now About Business Velocity, 25May2011). Indeed, to paraphrase more than one participant at Saugatuck’s 2012 Cloud Business Summit, “What we think we know about Cloud is probably what was true 6 or 12 months ago. That’s already old.”