What Saugatuck found at this year’s 2011 HP Analyst Strategy Summit in San Francisco was a far more balanced and coordinated message from HP on how it will respond to technology trends such as Cloud IT, Consumerization, and Security. HP managed to provide a balanced vision of what the future holds for the IT industry under a unifying "seamless, secure, context-aware" banner.

Certainly lacking was detail in some areas on how this will be accomplished by and within HP. One example is HP’s strategic intention to build a PaaS offering for enterprises to develop and deliver applications via the Cloud. HP announced that implementation would be in stages (a public storage service by year end 2011, a compute service by 2012 that would then provide the foundational assets for its longer-term goal of a comprehensive PaaS offering). Another example of strategic intent is HP’s goal to heavily invest in the higher margin software market (but not in legacy transaction-orientated software like SAP). Vague? Yes, but we would not expect HP to share a detailed list of targets with over 350 analysts (even though we were under NDA).

Sorting through recent news and press releases on the subject of CRM, one can’t help but feel overwhelmed at all of the information, hype, and assorted details of the various product releases. As CRM providers jockey for position in the cloud with their respective offerings, prospective buyers need guidance on what is available, how to evaluate and best select the solution that properly fits their needs. As we mentioned in our recent perspective (MKT-860, Toward a Framework for Evaluating Cloud-Based CRM, 18March2011), many CRM buyers lack core insights to make informed and correct decisions.

There are several decision points around CRM and, specifically, CRM in the Cloud. Prospective buyers of CRM solutions need to determine what their business process requirements are around Customer Relationship Management. Many organizations fail to do this prior to starting to look at potential solutions. Once process requirements are established, the determination could be made as to the best deployment method. Some organizations have already made the decision to go Cloud whenever and wherever possible for new business applications implementations. Others would rather focus on functionality and then let that decision determine the deployment. But decision-makers should never just assume that Cloud is the way to go or that a specific solution that may be a popular choice is necessarily the right one.

If approved by regulators in the U.S., Germany and Europe, AT&T’s acquisition of T-Mobile U.S. will create the largest mobile provider in the U.S., and provides the new carrier with sufficient scale to move to LTE post-haste.  As many undoubtedly noticed, both U.S. GSM carriers had resisted this move, but Verizon Wireless’ aggressive deployment of LTE radically and rapidly re-altered the competitive U.S. landscape.  The prospective consolidation of this country’s two largest GSM providers does so once again.  The three remaining nationwide carriers control approximately 95% of the U.S. market, with the two top carriers’ combined share over 75% (some industry estimates place it very close to 80%).

Saugatuck’s research indicates that Cloud IT consulting will rapidly grow in response to user organizations’ needs for assistance in planning for, and managing, hybrid IT environments that encompass business, IT, and other stakeholders (HR and Finance).

Saugatuck has highlighted the leading Cloud consulting firms that provide consulting, implementation, development, managed services, and reseller services focused on SaaS based applications and development platforms (747MKT, “Cloud Facilitators: A New Route to Market for Cloud Vendors,” 17June2010). Our most recent Strategic Perspective covers the firms that provide consulting at the Cloud infrastructure or IaaS stack (848 MKT, Cloud IT Enablement Consultants: Emerging Opportunity For Redesigning IT, 22 February 2011).  Understanding provider capabilities, motivations and experience is critical in selecting a consulting offering that will fit your requirements.

Yesterday Verizon and Terremark announced a definitive agreement under which Verizon will acquire and operate Terremark as a wholly owned subsidiary under the leadership of Terremark’s current management team.

This announcement is a win-win for both companies, and is external confirmation that the Cloud Computing market is a key propellant of future growth in the information technology sector (see “Key SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS Trends Through 2015 – Business Transformation Via the Cloud”, 834SSR, 17Jan2011).