Author: Bruce Guptill With physical IT and business boundaries already dissipating, will ubiquitous, cheap smartphones be the force that tips global business into new architectures and new business models, faster than we think and sooner than we’re ready ...

Author: Robert Cohen If telcos are to compete with the Amazons, Googles, and Microsofts of the world in providing customers with Cloud services, they will need to transform their networks to incorporate a number of new capabilities. Telcos plan to become ...

Author: Brian Dooley The Enterprise Personal Cloud is a key component of the re-engineered IT vision we have referred to as the Boundary Free Enterprise™.  As yet, the Personal Cloud is poorly understood, and has been considered mainly as an enhance ...

Author: Alex Bakker Looking back, 2012 was a year of maturation and development for Social Business IT that saw most ESN vendors evolving their offerings. At the beginning of 2012 we offered our predictions on what would be the driving forces in the evol ...

Author: Alex Bakker Despite a promised ease of communication and reduction in the volume of email, few real world applications have shown that Enterprise Social Network (ESN) use reduces email volume. Meanwhile, an abundance of information over the last ...

Author: Alex Bakker Briefings and conversations with vendors and IT end users have highlighted a growing interest in leveraging Enterprise Social Networks and their APIs to provide additional, integrated data streams to their users. As their APIs and int ...

Author: Robert Cohen This Strategic Perspective offers a vision of what the telco of 2017 will look like. It assumes that most telcos will transform themselves into “cloud services-providing” telcos by 2017. The analysis examines trends that will lead to ...

Author: Bruce Guptill Verizon Wireless rolled out its anticipated “shared data” plan this week. The plan, which emphasizes tiered data usage pricing that can be distributed among multiple user devices on the same account, is set to go into effect over th ...

Author: Bruce Guptill and Alex Bakker Saugatuck regularly handles questions from clients regarding a variety of aspects all of our research programs, including Mobility, Cloud, Social and Analytics. This Strategic Perspective summarizes and highlights a ...

Author: Steve Kovsky Cloud and the impact/importance of mobile broadband took center stage at the recent Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Saugatuck’s Steve Kovsky participated in a series of sessions and discussion on the topic, and reports back that ...

Author: Robert Cohen Telcos are already playing significant roles in Cloud IT and business services, but there remains a long road for them to travel. To play a central role in providing Cloud services, telcos will need to transform themselves in a numbe ...

Author: Robert Cohen Challenged by declining wireless and broadband revenues, telcos have sought to become important players in Cloud services. Initially, they focused on hosting services, often tied to putting applications used by large businesses in th ...

Author: Bruce Guptill Saugatuck sees two important trends regarding smartphones and users shaping IT management costs now, and likely to accelerate IT complexity beyond what most enterprise IT and business organizations are prepared to manage: The per ...

Author: Robert Cohen Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) and HP have created an initiative to help service providers play a much larger role in delivering cloud services to businesses and consumers.  ALU describes CloudBand, its foundation for a new class of ‘carr ...

Author: Bruce Guptill Mobility is not just about smartphones and tablets, credit-card swipers, location-based data, and skinnied-down versions of desktop business environments.  Mobility is about users and devices conducting business in a variety of ...

  Author: Brian Dooley The Mobile Cloud represents a set of formats in which the Cloud and Mobility come together to create synergies and new opportunities for users and vendors alike. This area is booming, and has ushered in a new range of innovat ...

Author: Bruce Guptill Conversations during and after SIIA’s recent All About Mobile event in San Francisco focused on what really makes mobility different and challenging, for developers, for IT vendors, or for enterprises. In this Strategic Perspective, ...

Author: Bruce Guptill Saugatuck SVP Bruce Guptill had the pleasure of participating in SIIA’s recent All About Mobile event in San Francisco Nov 15 2011, including chaired a panel on mobile payments and participating in sideline discussions and sessions. ...

Authors: Bruce Guptill, Larry Perlstein Research In Motion (RIM), makers of the once-ubiquitous Blackberry devices and message service, announced on Oct 26, that the expected software upgrade for its PlayBook tablet computer is not expected to ship until ...

Authors: Robert Cohen, Bruce Guptill “Cloud-in-a-box” solutions from telcos and other providers will vastly increase SMB Cloud usage, and enable significant counter-cyclical economic shifts, by making it easier for SMBs to obtain and utilize private-Clou ...

Author: Lisa Pierce This Strategic Perspective assesses how Unified Communications-as-a-Service (UCaaS) suppliers can emerge potentially stronger from the recession by moving beyond telephony-centric UC applications to those that knit UC with analytics t ...

Author: Bruce Guptill Google helped wake up and shake up Cloud, mobility, consumer, and enterprise IT markets with its announcement early Monday August 14 that it plans to acquire Motorola Mobility. Motorola Mobility in turn announced Monday that it had ...

Authors: Bruce Guptill and Lisa Pierce Based on US-based carriers’ actions and announcements in recent months, the era of one-price, all-you-can-use bandwidth is reaching its end. Saugatuck sees this as unsurprising, inevitable, and eminently predictable ...

Author: Lisa Pierce As a consequence of addressing many of the ‘basic’ customer support and satisfaction issues, companies are experiencing improved business results. But this of course only raises the bar – where should they next find ways to improve cu ...

Authors: Lisa Pierce and Bruce Guptill The Open Visual Communications Consortium (OVCC) is a federated, Cloud-based solution to tackle Cloud providers’ problems, specifically created to break down the walls that caused today’s videoconferencing islands. ...

Authors: Lisa Pierce and Bruce Guptill As companies slowly emerge from the recession, their contact centers are experiencing a surge in demand for services. However, few contact centers have all the necessary state-of-the-art equipment completely in plac ...

Authors: Bruce Guptill, Alex Bakker and Charlie Burns On June 6 2011, at the opening of Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference, Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced iCloud, a comprehensive Cloud-centric business and technology environment model that spans Appl ...

Authors: Lisa Pierce and Bruce Guptill Erstwhile rural U.S. telecom provider CenturyLink has made a decidedly sudden entrance into the Cloud by virtue of its merger with Qwest, and its planned acquisition of Savvis. In this Strategic Perspective, Century ...

Author: Lisa Pierce and Bruce Guptill On April 1 2011, telecom services provider CenturyLink completed its acquisition of Qwest Communications International. When combined with CenturyLink’s planned acquisition of Savvis, the merger should provide busine ...

Authors: Bruce Guptill, Lisa Pierce, Charlie Burns Based on the recent spate of acquisitions by US-based telcos and cable providers, Saugatuck believes that 2011 will be recalled as the year that carriers “got serious” about Cloud IT. This week, Century ...

Author: Buce Guptill Cisco announced its decision this week to shut down its Flip video camera division. To Saugatuck, Cisco’s move illustrates the dangers inherent in a non-cohesive, non-centered Cloud business and technology strategy. Cisco acquired P ...

Author: Bruce Guptill On Tuesday March 22, 2011, the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) announced its intent to standardize and promote a series of data networking protocols, tools, interfaces, and controls known as Software-Defined Networking (SDN) that c ...

Author: Lisa Pierce The FCC’s Net Neutrality decision (FCC 10-201) leaves current and future U.S. cloud service providers and customers facing conflicting choices when it comes to WAN services and access technology. This Strategic Perspective examines th ...

Authors: Alex Bakker and Robert McNeill To understand the fundamental changes and growth in Social Media and to plan for yet-unseen market changes, Saugatuck is focusing more research and resources on a variety of aspects of Social Media research. This S ...

Authors: Lisa Pierce and Bruce Guptill U.S. Cloud service providers and their customers may assume that the results of the November elections mean they won’t have to worry about aggressive Net Neutrality rulemaking by the FCC. But even if the FCC issues ...

Authors: Lisa Pierce and Bruce Guptill Despite many carrier core competencies that make them strong Cloud IT contenders, recent Saugatuck research shows that enterprise decision makers who are responsible for Cloud IT purchase decisions rarely consid ...

Author: Bruce Guptill Members of the software community behind OpenOffice.org have decided to create a new organization that will be independent from Oracle and speed up improvements to the code in the open source alternative to Microsoft Office. The new ...

Authors:  Mike West, Charlie Burns, Robert McNeill Private Clouds have been grabbing headlines for the past year or more, as several leading Cloud IT vendors – HP, IBM, VMware and now Oracle, among others – have announced hardware / software bundles inte ...

Authors: Lisa Pierce and Bruce Guptill What Cloud-based opportunities should telecom carriers embrace? Given their history, there are some logical beginnings. Carriers offered the very first cloud based services when they introduced Centrex services a ha ...

Author: Bruce Guptill Cisco Systems Inc. on March 9, 2010 announced its new CRS-3 network routing system. The CRS-3 represents an important industry step toward three goals: Increasing the availability of bandwidth, which should reduce the costs of bandw ...

Author: Bruce Guptill The competitive landscape for data centers and Cloud Computing is being changed by another major IT acquisition. On Wednesday 11 Nov. 2009, Hewlett-Packard Co announced an agreement to acquire 3Com Corp. for $7.90 per share, or appr ...

Author: Bruce Guptill This week, Verizon Wireless announced its new "Any Apps, Any Device" program, to be rolled out to its customers some time in 2008. In the program, customers will be able to use wireless devices and applications not developed or sold ...