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:

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.