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.

What is Happening?  Saugatuck SVP Bruce Guptill spent this week in Nashville participating in Sage North America’s annual customer and partner Summit. In addition to participating in group sessions with Sage channel and product executives, Guptill took part in numerous sideline discussions with Sage partners, and one-on-one interviews with Sage CEO Pascal Houillon and CTO Himanshu Palsule. Q&A from that interview will be published in a separate, in-depth Strategic Perspective for Saugatuck CRS subscription research clients.

Our net takeaway from this year’s Summit: Like other business software vendors everywhere, Sage is in the middle of a company-deep, Cloud-necessary reinvention. The rapid pace of market change has forced Sage to accept and execute a potentially overwhelming series of significant business and technological challenges, including the following:

One interesting and fun aspect of the upcoming 2012 Cloud Business Summit event in NYC is the debut of Saugatuck’s Beacon Awards for business innovation. More information on the Awards is available on the Cloud Business Summit site, but we want to take some time and space here to introduce and explain the Awards, the nomination process, and the Award criteria.

The Beacon Awards are about the use of technologies in innovative ways to improve, drive, or create business in four areas of business and IT:

After sifting through all my notes from sessions, emails, in-person meetings, the blogosphere and twitter, since Monday, here’s my net take on SAP, and the Sapphire event – the detailed version will be available to Saugatuck CRS clients in a Strategic Perspective to be published late tomorrow.

1. SAP's future business builds on HANA; HANA is at least as key to SAP’s future as R/3 was to its past. And the HANA strategy is all about Cloud.
2. SAP is making logical and expected moves to Cloud. Quite a bit of what has been announced or unveiled here at Sapphire has already been seen, expected, or is already in use. What we’re seeing at Sapphire is SAP’s coordinated, strategic position on everything Cloud and everything SAP – and SAP has made it clear that those are one and the same.
3. The breadth and depth of SAP’s Cloud moves, however, are of such magnitude that they could have an effect on how we think of Cloud - similar to the effect that IBM’s entry into desktop/personal computers had on the business legitimacy of PCs and their associated applications and networking.
4. What is most impressive about SAP’s approach to me is SAP’s strong emphasis on getting things done and delivered. A great deal of credit for this goes to Lars Dalgaard and the Successfactors team, which is Cloud-native and business savvy, not to mention driven.
5. But at least equal credit must go to SAP leadership for recognizing the need for change, and for initiating and enforcing change from the top down in a manner that retains and, in cases, increases the value of existing investments by SAP, its customers, and its partners. It cannot have been an easy or simple series of decisions to install and foster the combination of personality, organization, and business approach that so fundamentally alters SAP’s trajectory.

But the bottom line is that SAP’s future is not about some generic or me-too strategy with the word “Cloud” in it. SAP is more “all-in” on Cloud than any other legacy IT provider at this point; company leadership has bet the future on widespread, common, and de facto business use of Cloud in all aspects, from core systems of record to lite mobile interactions. If SAP is to succeed, Cloud must be the core business IT worldwide. Soon. 

Leveraging mobility is on the minds of everyone everywhere these days. You cannot look in an airport, office building, sidewalk, or café without immediately seeing someone using a mobile device. Cafes seem to be the new office, and people sit there for hours working on laptops, iPads and smartphones, meeting with others and, only incidentally, drinking coffee. Walking down the street, you cannot walk far without seeing someone talking on a mobile phone or texting or browsing the Internet, while the light changes from red to green.

Mobile devices – how do we harness their ubiquity and power for business advantage? How do we address the leading concerns about security and privacy, the cost of developing solutions for a multiplicity of mobile platforms, and the complexity of integrating mobile devices with the Cloud andCloud business services?