What is Happening?  This week, Saugatuck research executives found themselves participating in three, simultaneous industry events shaping the world of Cloud IT and business. CEO Bill McNee and SVP Bruce Guptill sat down with key executives (including C-level meetings) at SAP Sapphire in Orlando; VP Mike West met with company leaders and users at ServiceNow’s Knowledge12 conference in New Orleans; and VP Charlie Burns took part in IBM’s invitation-only Cloud Innovation Forum in Chicago. It’s been a Cloudy week for Saugatuck, in other words.

The net takeaway from all three events, including dozens of discussions with provider and customer leaders, is that the religious wars and mystery about what Cloud is all about is clearly gone. The critical questions for providers and user enterprises have shifted from “What is it” and “Why should we?” to “When should we?” to “How do we?”

Yesterday, Saugatuck participated in a special hour-long internet-based radio program hosted by VoiceAmerica’s Business Network entitled “In the Cloud with Game-Changers.”

The radio show was recorded and can be accessed at the following link: http://bit.ly/Ip5US7.

The panel focused on a variety of topics and issues related to the Cloud as a Game-Changer, including:

• What is driving Cloud demand (and how are customers gaining value)?

• Cloud as part of the new emerging Master Architecture (Cloud, Mobile, Social and Advanced Analytics, or "CMSA" plus Integration) – driving what Saugatuck is referring to as the Boundary-free Enterprise™

• Challenges associated with security and privacy – how real?

• What are the key strategies that customers are deploying to win in the Cloud?

• Thoughtful predictions relative to Cloud adoption five years forward (2017).

Joining Saugatuck CEO Bill McNee on the panel were Rainer Zinow, SVP at SAP, Kamesh Pemmaraju, Senior Product Manager at Dell, and Dr. Steve Hodgkinson, Research Director at Ovum.

While sponsored by SAP, this was a vendor-neutral radio show.

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.

What is Happening?  Last week, Saugatuck attended the Wells Fargo Tech Summit in San Francisco, moderating a panel and meeting with a number of industry leaders. This was the second year that we participated in the conference – which we greatly value as another important window into the dynamics shaping the market for business computing products and services – in this case a Wall Street perspective.

Day 1 of the event was filled with an all-star cast of industry leaders. I especially valued John Chambers (CEO, Cisco) opening keynote, as well as the Consumerization of IT panel, Jason Maynard’s (Wells Fargo’s lead software analyst) fireside chat with Safra Catz (CFO, Oracle) – as well as the panel that I moderated on the Future of IT (with senior executives from Snaplogic, ServiceMesh, Deloitte and Nodeable). One of the highlights of the morning session was a short presentation by Biri Singh (Head of Cloud Services, HP), where he outlined at a high level HPs new holistic Cloud strategy that was subsequently announced this past Tuesday (see Saugatuck’s initial take in our Lens 360 blog post HP Cloud Update: Solid Strategy and a Top-down Mandate, 09Apr2012).

What is Happening?  Earlier this quarter, Saugatuck began publishing the results of a deep-dive interview program conducted with large-enterprise CIOs and CTOs, with a focus on gathering first-person insights into the impact that Cloud is having on IT strategy and planning. Last week, Saugatuck traveled to Europe and was able to extend this research through a series of one-on-one meetings and briefings with large-enterprise IT leaders, as well as keynoting the well-attended annual EuroCloud France conference in Paris.

This Research Alert provides some top-line insights as previously published in two premium research pieces, as well as extend the analysis with new input from this European trip. Overall, our research clearly demonstrates an accelerating pace and scope of Cloud adoption – with Cloud now fully accepted and fundamental in the plans of most of the senior IT leaders we have spoken to (globally).