What is Happening?   

The Boundary-free Enterprise™ continues to impact the formula-to-value provided by major IT vendors.  None, however, has taken on the full-scale transformation that Dell has, from leading PC vendor to consumers to Boundary-free Enterprise supplier of end-to-end business enablement solutions.  Today’s Cloud-savvy Enterprise buyers are looking for new kinds of solutions to re-charge their efficiency, effectiveness and make innovative use of Mobile, Social and Advanced Analytics. Dell is remaking itself in order to be, not just their supplier, but their partner in business success.

Despite the unresolved status of Dell’s proposed leveraged buyout – still on hold after three months of market machinations from Carl Icahn and the Blackstone Group – Dell announced the acquisition of Enstratius this week.  Enstratius offers software and services to manage application provisioning and scaling, application configuration management, usage governance, and cloud utilization monitoring across public, private and hybrid Clouds. Enstratius currently supports more than twenty public and private Clouds.

Dell’s Software Division, under the management of former CA CEO John Swainson, has built an impressive portfolio of security and systems management solutions, largely through acquisition (see list below).

When Saugatuck first looked at Windows Azure – including conducting a series of interviews with System Integrator (SI) and ISV developers of over 125 Cloud solutions in the early adopter wave – it was a comparatively primitive platform positioned somewhere between IaaS and PaaS. At the time, I thought it was clever to say it was “half PaaS.”

However, times have changed, and the Windows Azure platform has matured significantly. Microsoft has relentlessly enhanced and extended its capabilities over the past five years. Today it is a fully-functioning platform with enterprise-worthy performance and a solid platform for ISVs deploying their solutions to the Cloud. To provide some idea of the extreme of processing power that Windows Azure can enable, I recommend you consider the Milliman case study.

On Tuesday, March 26, Saugatuck’s Alex Bakker and Mike West joined Bill.com in an SIIA webcast on the rapidly-evolving Cloud category of Mobile Financial Management. Cloud-based financial applications are helping businesses streamline the process of paying bills, projecting cash flow, and conducting business transactions. And it is no secret that companies are taking the next step to deliver these solutions via mobile devices in order to help executives manage their businesses – anytime and anywhere.

Among the timely and urgent topics Saugatuck covered in this highly-informative Webcast were:

On November 14, 2012, Saugatuck held its 2^nd annual Cloud Business Summit at the Westin Times Square in New York City. As with our inaugural event, this year’s conference brought together large-enterprise CIOs, CTOs and senior business leaders to explore what is possible, what is real, and what is not in the Cloud today.

In Part II of our afternoon Featured panel entitled “Cloud Infrastructure – Maximizing Value at What Cost and Risk?, our distinguished group of panelists focus on the consistency benefit of moving to the Cloud, especially for issues such as security, and issues related to the protection of personal data.