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.  

Saugatuck’s research among user enterprises includes a fast-growing number of Big Data analytics projects, which are still mostly trials, PoCs, and other relatively limited, mostly conceptual instances – but with significant portent and potential. And too often, we see the leaders involved in planning and delivering these projects move from getting the basics in place to leaping forward well ahead of the immediate needs and practical business goals. They fail too often to stick with the practical needs and considerations – partly because these projects are new with unknown requirements, partly because they are swept up in possibilities and potential. Risk (including scope creep, cost, security exposure, resource hogging) too often begins to outweigh reward and reality, because so much of the risk is new, unseen or under-appreciated.

A key method of reducing and managing risk in any Cloud transition, but especially in Big Data projects, is to stay as practical as possible throughout the conceptualization, planning, and execution. A new Strategic Perspective from Saugatuck lays out three significant planning and management considerations that help enterprise planners stick to the practicalities while enabling the education and experience needed, and of course while enabling real business benefits.

During the week of 29 April through 3 May IBM hosted its annual Impact 2013 (subtitled “Business. In Motion”) conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. Befitting the location, Impact is a huge business conference (with 8,500 attendees this year) and has a definite Las Vegas flavor (the keynote opened with a car driven on stage and dubbed a “rolling data center”).

IBM’s market positioning and messaging continues to be a bellwether for large-enterprise IT trends overall. This year’s Impact emphasis on the combination of Cloud, Mobility, Social, and Analytics – plus the importance of native integrative capabilities – underscores the emergence and reality of the loosely-coupled, “elemental” IT and business architectures that are increasingly prevalent, that enable a variety of Boundary-free Enterprise™ configurations, and which are reshaping providers’ go-to-market positioning.