1140RA Profiting From IT+Business Innovation: Saugatuck’s Beacon 2012 Awards

What is Happening? — In last week’s Research Alert, we noted the following: The pace of Cloud-driven business innovation is outstripping even the accelerating pace of IT innovation – and therefore is outpacing the abilities of established IT and business management organizations and structures (1138RA, Cloud Business Summit 2012 – The BfE Comes to NYC, 01Nov2012).

Our core warning to enterprises (and to the IT providers serving them): Increasing complexities and costs of doing business and managing IT, in a time when Cloud promises to help organizations and leaders deliver exactly the opposite.

Not all enterprises are overwhelmed, however. Forward-thinking, proactive firms are utilizing Cloud capabilities to improve their existing businesses, create new ways of doing business, and overall extending and increasing their abilities to lead and succeed.

At next week’s 2012 Cloud Business Summit in New York (Date: Nov. 14; Location: Westin Times Square), we will be presenting the inaugural “winners” of Saugatuck’s Beacon Awards for IT and business innovation. The types of innovation that qualify firms for the Beacon Awards focus on significant improvements in how a firm operates, the types of markets or lines of business that it is in, or how a firm has applied different ways of thinking, management, and use of technologies to create new offerings, markets, ways of doing business, or entirely new businesses.

We are pleased to announce that six firms have qualified as “finalists” for this year’s Beacon Awards, as follows (listed in alphabetical order):

Actelion Pharmaceutical, for its innovative data analytics methodology and architecture enabling exceptional cost reductions in program tracking and regulatory compliance.
Brewster Dairy, for innovation and improvements in core business operations and management via its implementation of Cloud-based, continuous flow of data and management information within and between core EAM and ERP systems, eliminating redundancies, speeding workflow, and enabling significant improvements in decision-making, business workflow and profitability.
Citi, for its innovative private Cloud infrastructure that drastically reduces service provisioning times and improves service levels while reducing total cost of ownership.
Harry Rosen, for its mobility-enabled, in-store, BYOD-driven customer relationship, sales and marketing approach that enabled significant and repeated revenue growth through recessionary environments.
NPD Group, for its integration of financial data through Cloud-based solutions, resulting in significant process streamlining, time and cost reductions, and resulting improvements in enterprise Finance planning, budgeting and management.
UBS, for its unique, repeatable and cost-effective approach to mobility and BYOD capabilities in support of sales revenues and customer retention, while maintaining the highest security and privacy levels required and possible.

Why is it Happening? — Seeing how forward-looking and proactive enterprises accomplish the challenging task of managing and enabling innovation for business and IT improvement helps us learn how our own enterprises can better benefit from the scope of Cloud and hybridized IT and business – without being overwhelmed and losing potential advantages.

Saugatuck Technology founded the Beacon Awards in 2012 to recognize outstanding business and IT innovation through the use of such advanced technologies as Cloud, mobility, social / collaborative IT, and advanced analytics. All nominated companies receive a thorough review and assessment by seasoned industry analysts from Saugatuck Technology. The Beacon Awards recognize business and IT leaders for innovation in four areas of business and IT:

Customer Engagement / Satisfaction
Products / Solutions
Markets / Partnering
Business Models / Realizing Revenue.

Examples such as those provided by the finalists for Saugatuck’s Beacon Awards provide useful and repeatable insights that help other firms see, identify, and act on the most suitable from a potentially vast and disconcerting range of opportunities.

Market Impact — Saugatuck will not only be indentifying the Beacon Award winners next week; we will be detailing their cases in a series of research deliverables for our subscription clients. This will provide valuable insights and guidance built on real-world innovation for business and IT use.

As noted in last week’s Research Alert, how we do business tends to be defined and limited by what technologies we use and how we use them. With Cloud – and more importantly, with the combination of on-premises IT and Cloud IT and business services, enabled by Mobile, Social, Analytics, and an improved ability to integrate all of these – we have more technologies that can be used to improve our organizations and our abilities to do business in many different ways.

So we have to invent, revise, and see new and better ways of blending IT and business in order to create and realize the advantages. That has to be done in an environment that in growing and changing at an increasing pace, which reduces our abilities to see what’s happening, let alone manage it. We have to innovate and adapt our on business and IT fronts simultaneously (918MKT, When Innovation is the Norm, Adaptation – Not Speed – Must be the Standard, 15July2012).

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Bruce Guptill

Most research firms can explain what happened; some can explain what is happening. Saugatuck Technology excels at understanding both in order to explain what else is likely to occur, and to guide its clients toward the actions that deliver them the greatest business value while enabling the safest business path.
To accomplish this, and to continually improve the value of Saugatuck’s work to clients in a Cloud-obscured marketplace, Saugatuck SVP and Head of Research Bruce Guptill pushes his team to continually re-examine and re-invent the company’s research programs to focus more on the costs, benefits, effects, and value of an ever-changing mix of technologies and providers in different markets.
Guptill’s own technology and business background laid a solid foundation for such a flexible, yet stable, approach to IT research value for clients. His technology research work includes mobility, collaborative IT, telecom, data networking, web commerce, and electronic marketplaces; his research work for enterprise IT and business clients includes return on IT investment, total cost of IT ownership, and business planning for IT. His research and guidance on vendor channel management, market identification and development, and buyer behavior analysis has enabled hundreds of established and startup IT providers to find, enter, and profit from new and traditional markets, while helping to guide user enterprise leaders toward optimal IT procurement and vendor management.
Guptill’s research background includes several years as a VP and research director with Gartner, senior positions with TeleChoice and Robert Frances Group, and editorial work within the IDG companies, including four years as a writer and editor with NetworkWorld. His marketing business focus was honed as VP of marketing for firms ranging from custom development providers to non-IT firms in aviation and other industries. His sales and channel experience started by traveling with a sample bag, then working for IT VARs, then advising telecom and wireless carriers on partner choices, to developing partner programs for traditional and Cloud-based software development firms and ISVs.
Guptill holds an MBA in marketing and finance, and a BA in the psychology and business of mass media communication. He is licensed to fly airplanes, drive boats, and sell houses; he is also a certified baseball coach, serves on the boards of regional civic groups, and is a serial home renovator. Married with three children, Guptill resides on Cape Cod in southeastern Massachusetts, and is a lifelong fan of the Red Sox, Patriots, Celtics, and the University of Connecticut Huskies.

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