Authors: Bruce Guptill, Mike West, Bill McNee

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?”

In fact, Saugatuck sees the next two to three years filled with extremely intense efforts by providers and users to develop and refine best practices regarding Cloud solution and provider selection, from core IT (IaaS/PaaS/SaaS) to social, mobile and analytics; along with best practices for integration of all this into, within, and between enterprise business operations.

For providers and user enterprises alike, Cloud is no longer about “What,” “Why,” or “When.” Cloud now is about “How.” And that’s changing providers’ go-to-market, along with buyer/user requirements for IT and provider value.

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