Just last week, we noted that this year’s SAPPHIRE event really crystallized SAP’s positioning and strategy as regards not just Cloud, but the entire company (1218RA, SAPPHIRE 2013: SAP is HANA, HANA is SAP, and the Enterprise Software Future is Not the Past, 16May2013).

The bottom line: SAP knows that in order to remain not just relevant, but dominant, it must reinvent itself from the inside out. The news this past year has been mostly about how the company is reinventing its offerings – i.e., their “outside” reinvention.

What is Happening?  Earlier this week, Amazon Web Services was granted the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) certification, becoming the 3^rd company so far to be approved for broad federal use. The certification comes after an exhaustive security and compliance assessment was sponsored by the Department of Health and Human Services, enabling AWS to enter the pool of companies seeking the certification.

The FedRAMP certification program was initially launched in 2010 but was not finalized until June of 2012, with the first certified company following in December 2012. Created by a collaboration between several government organizations including the Federal CIO Council, the goal was to reduce the time and effort of redundant assessments being conducted by each agency attempting to move to cloud services by providing a general level of assurance across organizations that a given cloud service met a predefined set of requirements.

What is Happening?  If it’s May, Saugatuck must be participating in SAP’s annual Sapphire user and partner event. And if we’re talking about SAP, we must be talking about what they said they would do, and what they have actually done.

Here’s what we said last May about SAP, Cloud, and the company’s business model:

Frank Slootman’s new mantra is “The End of No. The Beginning of Now.”  The ServiceNow CEO uses this clever phrasing to illustrate how a small change can transform IT from a bureaucracy to a service business. The key? A customer focus driven by Service Relationship Management and the capability of ServiceNow’s platform to support the needs of fourteen distinct customers (and their use cases) within the Cloud ITSM Suite. ServiceNow wants to be the "ERP of IT," a single system of record in the Cloud, inter-operating with enterprise and partner apps.

Over the past year under Slootman’s guidance, ServiceNow (NYSE: NOW) has become a Wall Street darling, much as salesforce.com once was in CRM’s high-growth phase. And who can blame the Street? When sales and customer growth is as rapid, and gross margins are nearly 60 percent, can profits be that far behind?

Yesterday, Saugatuck announced its third annual Cloud Business Summit, which will be held this year on September 25, 2013 at the Westin Times Square in New York City.