Analytics, process management and automation are gradually opening the way for business process autonomy, in which immediate operational decisions are automatically made on the basis of real time analysis of multiple data streams. Autonomy has made headlines in manufacturing and robotics, and more recently, in autonomous vehicles. But these capabilities, applied to business processes, will have revolutionary consequences for how businesses perform, with wide scale implications for vendors and IT departments alike.

Autonomy is the natural result of the application of real time analysis to process automation. So far, Business Process Automation (BPA), Analytics, and Corporate Performance/Process Management have been loosely coupled within the business environment; that is, each operated within specific areas, with uneven application across the enterprise, and relatively little integration. With maturity, however, the combined result will increase business velocity many fold, and create a wide range of new infrastructure demands, as well as opening the way for exciting new opportunities across the spectrum of business activities.

What is Happening?  Announcements within the past two weeks by IBM and Oracle have been touted as helping to promote the use of private Clouds. Saugatuck believes that they may actually help to limit the attractiveness of private Clouds, while driving more and better management of the fast-growing hybridized Cloud-plus-on-premises IT environment.

Last week, IBM announced that it will be joining the OpenStack Foundation as a platinum-level sponsor, joining a panoply of traditional and pure-play Cloud IT brands that includes AT&T, Canonical, HP, Nebula, Rackspace, Red Hat and SUSE. As part of the announcement, IBM also announced that all of its Cloud services and software will be based on the Open Cloud Reference Architecture.

As Cloud adoption continues to accelerate this year, Saugatuck has initiated a focused research program to refresh and expand our research in ISV Cloud transitions. The first wave of these transitions was rather uneven in results with notorious failures and many expensive lessons learned. Moreover, this research will reflect the evolved set of issues and challenges brought about by the shift to the Boundary-free Enterprise™. This applies equally to pure-play Cloud ISVs entering the market as well as traditional ISVs evolving their offering portfolios with new Cloud solutions.

Today’s Cloud platforms are far superior in enabling ISV Cloud transitions and their ongoing operations. Nevertheless, those significant business challenges do remain both for pure-play startups as well as established on-premises ISVs transitioning, primarily in these seven areas:

Earlier today, Saugatuck had a good call with Jason Blessing, the new CEO at Plex Systems, who joined the company in early 2013. Saugatuck has been tracking Plex for more than 5 years – as we have long viewed it as an innovator in Cloud-based business software targeting primarily discrete manufacturing. While the firm has a strong heritage in the auto sector, we were pleased to hear that Jason has several new initiatives underway to help it not only strengthen the core but broaden the firm’s focus to appeal to other manufacturing sectors as well.

Jason was previously part of the leadership team at Taleo, which was acquired by Oracle in mid-2012. He brings to the job some very strong (and relevant) product and general management leadership skills, given his experience is creating, growing and scaling a Cloud-based apps business. As he explained in the call, in June 2012 the firm was acquired by Francisco Partners (from Apax), a San Fran based PE player. In December, an additional $30 million infusion was made by Accel Partners.

Heads up to our research subscription clients: Saugatuck has just published a Strategic Perspective that complements and extends the research and guidance presented in our recent (1187SSR, Understanding Cloud Infrastructure Costs: Navigating for Savings, 07Mar2013).

The fundamental motivation for this latest Strategic Perspective stems from an elementary business precept which holds that the best surprise is no surprise. Our objective is to provide sufficient insights and guidance regarding TCO models for Cloud versus traditional IT, so as to avoid surprises such as unplanned costs or inappropriate tradeoff between optional functionality and additional cost.