Saugatuck Announces Winners of Beacon Awards for Business Innovation

We congratulate and are pleased to announce the winners of Saugatuck Technology’s first annual Beacon Awards, which recognize excellence and innovation in the use of Cloud, mobile, social and analytics technologies in ways to improve, drive, or create business in four areas of business and IT:

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

Our four winners will be recognized later this afternoon at Saugatuck’s 2nd annual Cloud Business Summit, being held today at the Westin Times Square in New York City. The inaugural Beacon Award winners are:

• Actelion Pharmaceutical, for its innovative data analytics methodology and architecture enabling exceptional cost reductions in program tracking and regulatory compliance.
• 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. 
• 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.

Saugatuck is also recognizing two additional companies who were finalists at the CIO / CTO conference – Brewster Dairy and NPD Group.

Per the Press Release that went out earlier today, Saugatuck Technology founder and CEO Bill McNee shared: “We are delighted to recognize these exceptional firms for their innovative approaches in creating new opportunities, and new business, while improving their strategic abilities to succeed and grow. The types of innovation that we see represented by these Beacon Award winners show how rapidly and profitably an agile, well-managed, and forward-thinking firm can leverage new and existing IT with new and traditional business operations to deliver major improvements. They help demonstrate that it’s not just IT, like Cloud, Mobile, Social, Advanced Analytics and Integration, but how these are being used to create and realize competitive advantage quickly and cost-effectively.” 

Saugatuck SVP and Head of Research Bruce Guptill added: “We are proud to recognize not only this year’s Beacon Award winners, but the several dozen firms that were nominated as part of the awards process. As a research organization, it was interesting and valuable to see the many ways that companies are leveraging today’s technology in new and innovative ways, and creating unique business value that improves their enterprises processes, ways of doing business, and even new business opportunities – it’s what our Cloud Business Summit is all about.”