What is Happening?  Saugatuck attended the PivotLink Customer & Marketing Analytic Summit this week in San Francisco. We came away from the event only further believing that an important shift is taking place in the BI industry – and, to some extent, the fast-growing Cloud BI industry segment as a whole.

PivotLink was founded initially as a general-purpose SaaS Business Intelligence (BI) player. However, over the past two years it has shifted its strategy from offering standard BI to specifically targeting the Retail market. This shift involved not only retargeting their own sales efforts around their solution, but developing significant internal expertise around the retail analytics industry. During this transition, Pivotlink also built and brought to market a specialized set of capabilities called Customer Performance METRIX that provide retail specific metrics, data visualizations, data exploration, and data ingestion solutions aimed at marketers and end users, rather than data scientists or business analysts. Along with several strategic partnerships with companies like Responsys and Datalogix, PivotLink has developed a targeted set of capabilities aimed at their chosen target market.

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?”

For a variety of reasons, Dell has been seen as a relatively “quiet” firm serving and enabling strategic enterprise IT. The company has been re-inventing itself rather significantly over the past few years, but is rarely one of the first names in the discussions around enterprise IT strategy, stacks, and Cloud.

This week, Saugatuck subscription research clients get a comprehensive look at how and why Dell has been rebuilding and growing, and increasing profitability, while evolving its business model beyond the low-cost, consumer PC space where it began. Key points include the following:

What is Happening?  As the emerging Master Architecture takes shape, enabling the Boundary-free Enterprise™ with solutions that free the mobile knowledge worker and executive from their desks and build on the Cloud, as well as other capabilities (such as social/collaboration, data analytics and integration), will stimulate business innovation through synergies of value.

According to a current article in the trade press, a new study from the Pew Internet & American Life Projectand Elon University, indicated that by 2020, the majority of U.S. consumers will use smartphones to pay for goods and services. While we believe this is an exciting development, Saugatuck regards the real interest in this trend to be in the way in which mobile payments will become a part of the emerging master Architecture and enable business innovation in the Boundary-free Enterprise™.

Saugatuck clients will be interested in this Perspective which re-examines the high rate of growth in Cloud IT within the Asia/Pacific region. This growth provides important indications as to how Cloud will develop elsewhere, as well as providing opportunities for international vendors to escape the doldrums of sluggish economies in the West. Here, we follow up on our projections from earlier research and look at emerging opportunities.

Key drivers of Asian Cloud developments include: