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:

Within Saugatuck we often have interesting internal debates about a wide range of industry issues. The one that came up Wednesday was Apple’s winning patent protection for the iPhone's graphical user interface for displaying electronic lists and documents. Wired ran a blog post by Christina Bonnington, “Apple Wins a User-Interface Patent That Smartphone Copycats Should Fear” that I picked up in Twitter and passed to my colleagues. Before I knew it, comments were flying fast and furious. I thought it would be informative, and entertaining, to share some of that internal debate with our blog readers.

Are software patents and copyrights a good idea?  Those who invest in the intellectual property seek some protection from the theft of their innovation and labors. As Apple CEO Tim Cook said at the D10 conference earlier this year, “From our point of view, it’s important that Apple not be the developer for the world.  We can’t take all of our energy and all of our care and finish the painting, then have someone else put their name on it.”

Yesterday, Saugatuck participated in a special hour-long internet-based radio program hosted by VoiceAmerica’s Business Network entitled “In the Cloud with Game-Changers.”

The radio show was recorded and can be accessed at the following link: http://bit.ly/Ip5US7.

The panel focused on a variety of topics and issues related to the Cloud as a Game-Changer, including:

• What is driving Cloud demand (and how are customers gaining value)?

• Cloud as part of the new emerging Master Architecture (Cloud, Mobile, Social and Advanced Analytics, or "CMSA" plus Integration) – driving what Saugatuck is referring to as the Boundary-free Enterprise™

• Challenges associated with security and privacy – how real?

• What are the key strategies that customers are deploying to win in the Cloud?

• Thoughtful predictions relative to Cloud adoption five years forward (2017).

Joining Saugatuck CEO Bill McNee on the panel were Rainer Zinow, SVP at SAP, Kamesh Pemmaraju, Senior Product Manager at Dell, and Dr. Steve Hodgkinson, Research Director at Ovum.

While sponsored by SAP, this was a vendor-neutral radio show.

Earlier this morning, Saugatuck listened in to the hour-long NetSuite (NYSE: N) earnings call for 1Q2012, recorded after the market closed yesterday. While not a huge part of our research process, monitoring vendor financial performance and Wall Street perspectives are an important additional input to our research process – beyond our ongoing client interactions, deep-dive vendor briefings, and primary buyer-demand research.

Overall, NetSuite reported strong 1Q2012 results, and well ahead of consensus estimates – with revenues advancing 29.7 percent (to $69.3 million), billings growing 26 percent, and earnings reaching $0.06 EPS. More impressive is the fact that year-over-year and quarter-to-quarter comparisons were particularly challenging, given strong performance in 1Q2011 and 4Q2012. NetSuite’s CFO guided the Wall Street analysts on the call toward full-year revenues of $295-$300 million, which would represent 25-27 percent growth, with operating margins approaching 6.0 percent (up from 5.3 percent in 2011).