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?”
Saugatuck clients will be interested in this Perspective which re-examines the high rate of growth in Cloud IT within the Asia/Pacific region. This growth provides important indications as to how Cloud will develop elsewhere, as well as providing opportunities for international vendors to escape the doldrums of sluggish economies in the West. Here, we follow up on our projections from earlier research and look at emerging opportunities.
Recently-published Saugatuck research provides Saugatuck’s Cloud vendor clients with TCO considerations and suggestions for accelerating Cloud adoption. In addition various factors are explained for users to consider when evaluating potential costs of Cloud offerings. These factors include:
Average utilization of the Cloud infrastructure
Economies achievable by large Cloud providers
List prices versus negotiated discounts for large/aggregated workloads
Our research has shown that users do not consistently consider these factors during evaluations and consequently do not gain an accurate projection of the costs of Cloud offerings.
