What is Happening?  This week has been full of Cloud Big Data and analytics announcements. From Intel to Microsoft, RedHat to VMware, IBM to Informatica, we’ve seen a series of rollouts, enhancements, extensions and open source contributions.

The consensus of Saugatuck’s discussions this week with provider and user enterprise executives is that the majority of provider activity consists of positioning themselves for future, expected opportunities; and the majority of user enterprise activity consists of interest, searches for knowledge, trials, and PoCs.

Mobile development is at the center of current evolutionary trends in enterprise software development, energizing agile concepts that have emerged from issues in large-scale monolithic projects. Trends toward smaller and more focused applications created in brief cycles and updated continuously ideally fit with the needs of smaller mobile devices with focused consumer-based usage patterns. Adding Cloud to the mix creates a model for development that can be used across all workstations, bringing new efficiencies and development requirements that lead to new ways of viewing the software creation, management, and deployment processes.

As the new development environment continues to emerge, it presents a range of intriguing possibilities for vendors and IT users alike. Vendors need to incorporate mobility and heterogeneous devices in their development and deployment tools. Management of mobile and conventional applications also needs to be unified, and tools will need to incorporate both mobile management and DevOps.

Addressing the conundrum of Cloud pricing is a challenge that can occupy ISVs transitioning to the Cloud for quite some time, at least in the first few years. And many more mature Cloud ISVs, though they have settled into a Cloud pricing strategy, still may not fully understand the range of options open to them, nor how they might rethink their Cloud pricing.

Little has changed since we first addressed the issue of the value metric in 2007 (344STR, SaaS Pricing: The Value Metric Is Only the Tip of the Iceberg, 3May2007).

On February 21^st, several Saugatuck analysts attended an audio conference focused on the IBM MobileFirst announcement, during which IBM provided an update on their newly announced offerings, their views of the mobility market, and their market strategy.

IBM’s target for MobileFirst is, as the name implies, the rapidly growing mobility market which by some estimates already includes over one billion smartphones and 400 million tablets. But, the real importance of MobileFirst is not simply a large number of new products and services. While the new offerings are significant in both their depth and breadth (details can be found on IBM’s MobileFirst website), Saugatuck believes the true importance and the underlying challenge of MobileFirst lie elsewhere.

In any uncertain environment, stability and a solid sense of direction are qualities to be sought and prized. In today’s still-emergent, ever-changing, hybridized Cloud+on-premises IT and business environment, such qualities should be among the top qualities in solutions and providers sought by IT buyers.

Unfortunately for the providers that tend to deliver these, their slow and steady progress, including incremental increases in solution capability and value, tend to be quietly ignored in favor of splashy, hyped, and sometimes theoretical offerings. There’s just not much that sexy about a long-term strategy and quietly-capable leadership.  But those qualities tend to reward not only the provider, but its partners and customers, enabling a solid and secure foundation, upon which to build and manage business in a constant series of crosswinds and earthquakes.