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:

What is Happening? — As 2012 marches to a close, a new focus on the enterprise Finance function is clearly taking place – with a range of viable and powerful Cloud-based solutions coming to market in support of upper-mid and large enterprises.

As our ongoing buyer demand research has consistently highlighted, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Collaboration (and to a lesser extent Social Networking) have clearly led in terms of early Cloud customer adoption (Wave I as shown in Figure 1). Following this flow, upper-mid-sized and large enterprises have begun to steadily embrace Cloud-based Human Capital Management (HCM) solutions over the past two years (Wave II), as the first of several “core” systems of record being adopted in the Cloud.

Earlier today Saugatuck Technology participated in an Analyst briefing with Workday. Find below some key takeaways from the briefing:

Mobility – this is clearly a key area of focus going forward, given accelerating adoption of iPhones and iPads among senior executives / managers in Workday’s client base. Workday identified a significant number of enhancements in support of smart phones and tablets. Among them, they are now beginning to leverage HTML5 for interface development – which will potentially serve as the backbone for cross-platform tablet support (i.e., Apple, Android).