On 11 July, 2012, Saugatuck attended participated in a briefing hosted by Laura Voglino, VP of Routes Transformation, in IBM’s Systems and Technology Group. The focus of the briefing was on IBM’s progress in securing independent application solution providers as business partners for their PureSystems family of offerings.

What is Happening?  To great fanfare, Microsoft announced its new Surface tablets this week. The demonstrations showed a well-designed piece of hardware that shows tremendous promise to help Microsoft establish and grow a user presence, and therefore ecosystem and revenue presences, in the fastest-growing computing segment today.

The Surface tablets offer a few innovations, including a built-in kickstand and combined keyboard/face cover, along with a solid set of functional capabilities that should be expected in any competitive tablet device today. Pricing has not been set, nor has availability. Given that the tablets will require the widespread availability and use of Windows 8, and that Windows 8 has not been released (and is still building early developer and support ecosystem presence), it’s really up in the air right now as to whether or not the Surface line will succeed. It certainly looks competitive from our point of view. The Surface specs and functional details are outside the scope of this Research Alert.

IT and business leaders responsible for making sure that their investments don’t cripple their enterprise’s ability to do business should take a look at Mike West’s latest Strategic Perspective, which introduces Saugatuck’s Risk/Reward Assessment model.

We see this as the first approach to IT assessment that provides both buyers and providers with an objective, truly useful means to identify and then manage challenges in understanding, evaluating, selecting, and managing IT solutions in this new era of the Boundary-free Enterprise^™ and dramatically-altered IT/business master architectures, and the processes and practices needed to cost-effectively manage them.

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?”

Given that the majority of Saugatuck clients today utilize multiple (usually dozens or more) Cloud-based IT and business services, how many have dusted off the SLAs related to those? What we’re finding out from our ongoing SaaS and Cloud IT research programs is that most have not given enough time and thought to viewing and understanding their Cloud IT SLAs. And too many, it seems, have not even negotiated the terms of those SLAs with their providers. That’s bad business for enterprise user/buyer and provider both.

This week, we’re reviewing and updating our original guidance regarding SaaS/Cloud SLA provisions and negotiation, and we strongly recommend that our client do the same. We’ve updated our core Strategic Perspective on the subject, which is being published this week for clients of our CRS subscription service. Here are the five points that every IT and business executive needs to understand and negotiate when it comes to any Cloud service level agreement: