We’ve seen much kerfuffle the past day-plus regarding the hiring of ex-Google product guru Marissa Mayer as Yahoo’s new CEO – the fifth Yahoo CEO in about a year. Most of the discussions have built around how Ms. Mayer can or will turn Yahoo around, bringing her Google product magic to a quietly-fading former web star.

In an era and environment obsessed with The Next Big Thing, Yahoo seems like slowly-cooling toast. In fact, the company is one of the largest web/Cloud portals, and it is profitable. But we must also admit that Yahoo is alive mainly because of its long-established, slowly-declining user base. In that way, Yahoo very closely resembles AOL – once the highest-flying web provider of all time, now a reasonably profitable web/Cloud content portal and messaging provider with a hard core of users, trying to find more and better ways to profit from a wide range of content.

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.

Analysis of Saugatuck’s most recent global SaaS/Cloud survey indicates regional differences that can be critical in determining market focus, as well as in predicting significant trends in Cloud deployment. As global business conditions continue to fluctuate, particularly between contradictory demands for cost savings and growth, Cloud provides an important mechanism for meeting business goals, and Cloud activity is a good indicator of business directions.

Perhaps the most important lesson is that Cloud development is highly sensitive to business confidence, which affects both the enterprise goals and budgets. Asia is buoyant, and therefore willing to spend on agility and growth-related projects. Europe and North America are in a slow recovery, upset by a series of cascading crises. Goals and spending plans oscillate according to the anticipated future environment. In every case Cloud is seen as an important technology for handling either a growth or “stand fast” solution.

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:

What is Happening?  Saugatuck’s ongoing research with IT and business leaders regarding their business, Cloud, social and other IT-related plans and actions reveals that, while core business priorities remain very similar from the smallest firms to the largest mega-enterprises, significant differences exist based in part on the relative size of firms. These differences shape what, why, how and when firms acquire and use IT of all types and forms, whether suite-based, Cloud-based, traditional, or hybridized.

Our latest global survey research provides us with very useful data regarding how firms of varying size differ in their business goals. The key differences are illustrated in Figure 1, and analyzed in detail in research published this week for Saugatuck CRS clients (1057MKT, Varying Value Needs: SaaS and Business Priorities from SMBs to Mega-Enterprises in 2012, published 25April2012).