What is Happening?  Like many mega-vendors, IBM is making serious investments in key trends and technologies driving the new Master IT architecture (Cloud / Mobile / Social / Analytics + Integration – see Research Alert 1054RA, published April 12, 2012), and the emergent Boundary-free Enterprise™. Several of these threads were on display and emphasized at the IBM Impact conference in Las Vegas, which Saugatuck participated in earlier this week – with a major focus around mobility, business integration and the importance of service architectures.

However, the biggest take away from the event for Saugatuck was a greater appreciation for what IBM is doing with its recently announced PureSystems family of integrated technology, and its potential to dramatically lower the costs of deploying, maintaining and managing new private Cloud workloads.

Saugatuck clients tend to be leading-edge user and provider firms looking for the latest intelligence to give them an edge in emergent IT and business environments, and there’s not much today more interesting to them than the combination of social and mobile IT (a.k.a. SoMo) in the enterprise. The latest Strategic Perspective from Alex Bakker examines synergies between mobile devices and social software, and proposes several potential use cases for the mobile/social duopoly within the enterprise.

Savvy IT leaders, for example, need to focus on generating specific use cases which will bring value to their business. Sample use cases, which take advantage of the broader feature-set available on modern smartphones and tablets, include the following:

A new Strategic Perspective from Saugatuck Technology uses our latest data and analysis to show how, and why, buyer/user expectations of benefits from SaaS/Cloud have changed dramatically since 2010. The net of it is as follows:

• What is expected of every solution and provider is a combination of cost reduction and speed to implementation. If a provider can’t demonstrate those two things in any situation, they can’t get a seat at the table.
• Meanwhile, almost all expectations of business improvement from SaaS/Cloud are also rising quickly, implying that buyers are not only much more comfortable with SaaS/Cloud than ever before, they are buying and using it in more areas – and therefore are more susceptible to disappointment when their expectations are not met.

The impact for providers is a need for new and different types of partnerships, from solution architecture and engineering that enable more agile and adaptive development and delivery, to micro-niche developers and providers able to deliver complementary capabilities not thought of when most solutions were engineered. Customers may not swap out SaaS/Cloud offerings that don’t grow to meet their expectations, but they will turn to other, complementary providers if the original provider can’t step up.

Recently-published Saugatuck research provides Saugatuck’s clients with a deeper analysis of the user perceptions of the benefits and the concerns associated with Cloud-based business solutions. Besides illustrating the results of our recent worldwide survey, we offer insights into the survey results which identify two types of IT organizations:

1. 1.Some are operating as cost centers and are primarily focused on satisfying tactical needs with concerns focused on traditional implementation issues.
2. 2.Others are looking to Cloud-based business solutions for strategic effects and have concerns focused on longer-term issues.

We urge both types of IT organizations to understand that emerging categories of solutions such as Mobile Device Management, Cloud Analytics/BI/Big Data, and Social/Collaboration software have both near term implementation considerations and broad-reaching implications for long term business strategy.

Earlier this morning, Saugatuck listened in to the hour-long NetSuite (NYSE: N) earnings call for 1Q2012, recorded after the market closed yesterday. While not a huge part of our research process, monitoring vendor financial performance and Wall Street perspectives are an important additional input to our research process – beyond our ongoing client interactions, deep-dive vendor briefings, and primary buyer-demand research.

Overall, NetSuite reported strong 1Q2012 results, and well ahead of consensus estimates – with revenues advancing 29.7 percent (to $69.3 million), billings growing 26 percent, and earnings reaching $0.06 EPS. More impressive is the fact that year-over-year and quarter-to-quarter comparisons were particularly challenging, given strong performance in 1Q2011 and 4Q2012. NetSuite’s CFO guided the Wall Street analysts on the call toward full-year revenues of $295-$300 million, which would represent 25-27 percent growth, with operating margins approaching 6.0 percent (up from 5.3 percent in 2011).