Authors: Bill McNee, Bruce Guptill Last week we caught up with Ashwin Rangan – a well-known innovator and thought-leader in IT systems and CIO leadership strategies (see Note 1). This Research Alert provides select quotes from our interview with Rangan, ...

Authors: Bill McNee, Bruce Guptill As part of our ongoing CIO Insights research program, Saugatuck’s Bill McNee and Bruce Guptill recently caught up with Ashwin Rangan, former CIO of Walmart.com and Conexant Systems (see Note 1) – and a well recognized i ...

Authors: Mike West, Mark Koenig Over the past few weeks Facebook has brought the issues of privacy and ownership / control of content that is created on social networks to the fore.  Twice this week Facebook’s Mark Zuckerman has posted to his blog a disc ...

Authors: Robert McNeill, Charlie Burns, Bill McNee Software developers – especially Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) with existing customers that are planning to develop and deliver Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings – should carefully focus on th ...

Authors: Robert McNeill, Charlie Burns Software developers – especially Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) with existing customers that are planning to develop and deliver Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings – should carefully focus on the second “S” ...

Authors: Bruce Guptill, Bill McNee, Mike West Recent Saugatuck Technology research indicates that not only are Finance executives embracing software-as-a-service, they see it as a key means of improving the strategic and operational capabilities of the F ...

Authors: Bill McNee, Mike West, Bruce Guptill, Mark Koenig, Charlie Burns The Finance organization sees SaaS as increasingly critical to their evolving business goals, and is increasingly investing in SaaS for point financial processes as well as core sy ...

Author: Bruce Guptill Rumors and debate abound regarding Danger, the mobile software and services developer purchased in 2008 by Microsoft. The core rumor is that Microsoft may base future Danger development on NetBSD, an open source operating system. Bl ...

Author: Charlie Burns Many of us can quickly think of various sports rivalries, such as that between the University of Michigan and Ohio State University in US college football, or between the Arsenal and Chelsea in UK football / soccer. Such rivalries h ...

Authors: Bill McNee, Sam Medina, Bruce Guptill In this recession, CIOs have an opportunity to leverage disruptive technologies to reduce operating expenses and to help transform their companies.  They also have the opportunity to consider new approaches ...

Authors: Charlie Burns, Bruce Guptill Recently some indications have surfaced (see Note 1) that Cisco may enter the server market with offerings that include networking management and virtualization. (Please see Saugatuck Research Alert RA-552, “Cisco’s ...

Authors: Bill McNee, Robert McNeill This Research Alert summarizes key findings from two recently published Strategic Perspectives, focusing on why SaaS and the Cloud will be used by the leading “offshore” services providers to build next generation IT a ...

Author: Mark Koenig Saugatuck clients – and many others – have been asking what impact the global economic downturn has had on the business priorities of senior executives. This Strategic Perspective looks at the results of new Saugatuck survey research ...

Author: Charlie Burns User IT organizations are striving to reduce infrastructure costs while improving the IT’s responsiveness to their business users. Implementing one or more forms of infrastructure virtualization is one of today’s most popular approa ...

Author:  Mike West Although the Microsoft Office suite has become the de facto work environment for most knowledge workers, cloud-based document creation and management solutions by Google and Zoho now offer a viable alternative at a much lower price poi ...

Author: Mike West Although the Microsoft Office suite has become the de facto work environment for most knowledge workers, cloud-based document creation and management solutions by Google and Zoho now offer a viable alternative at a much lower price poin ...

Authors: Charlie Burns, Bruce Guptill The possible entry by Cisco into server markets with offerings that include networking management and virtualization has prompted Saugatuck to assess the roles and challenges of vendors and users in a changing IT inf ...

Authors: Robert McNeill, Bill McNee This Strategic Perspective explores the current and mid-term Cloud and SaaS strategies of five of the leading Indian offshore giants, Cognizant, Infosys, Satyam, TCS and Wipro, based on a series of recent deep-dive bri ...

Authors: Robert McNeill, Bill McNee Corporate customers are demanding the articulation of a cloud computing strategy from service providers. With the Indian providers success in the outsourcing market beginning to plateau, Cloud Computing provides an exc ...

Authors: Mark Koenig, Mike West Google announced on Wednesday that it is initiating a reseller program for Google Apps Premier Edition.  Google Apps Premier is a SaaS office productivity suite platform that consists of a relatively easy-to-set-up network ...

Authors: C. Burns, M. West, B. McNee, B. Guptill, M. Koenig This Research Alert briefly summarizes some of the key findings from a recently published 26-page Research Report entitled “Transition to SaaS: An ISV Cookbook” (SSR-545), published on December ...

Authors: Charlie Burns, Bruce Guptill On November 12, 2008, Sam Palmisano, IBM Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, spoke at the 2008 Business Leadership Forum in Istanbul, Turkey. His remarks focused on a concept termed the “Smarter Planet.” Palmisano ...

Author: Mark Koenig Saugatuck expects increased interest and use of social computing solutions among consumers and businesses in the coming year. But we also believe that unlike prior years, which saw seemingly unfettered growth in all things social, the ...

Authors: Charlie Burns, Bruce Guptill, Mark Koenig, Bill McNee, Mike West Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is increasingly considered “enterprise grade” by many IT buyers, and a viable choice to achieve reduced costs, improved service, and ongoing timely fun ...

Authors: Mike West, Mark Koenig, Bruce Guptill, Bill McNee This Research Alert summarizes key findings from two recently published Strategic Perspectives, focusing on five of the most important and disruptive technologies to watch in 2009, as well as fiv ...

Author: Bruce Guptill In our first major research report on the evolution and adoption of open source software in 2007, Saugatuck made a series of statements and issued several Strategic Planning Positions (SPPs) regarding growth, change, and the future ...

Authors: Mark Koenig, Mike West, Bruce Guptill, Bill McNee Saugatuck’s ongoing research agenda focuses on the emerging IT trends that disrupt enterprise markets and business models – most importantly, how information technologies and their use will chang ...

Authors: Mark Koenig, Mike West, Bruce Guptill, Bill McNee Saugatuck’s research focuses on the emerging IT trends that disrupt enterprise IT markets and business models – most importantly, how information technologies and their use will change user busin ...

Author: Bruce Guptill Saugatuck’s latest research study on the evolution and adoption of open source software indicates that what the market considers as “open source” software is changing, and changing rapidly. Entitled Power, Speed and Assimilation: O ...

Authors: Bruce Guptill, Charlie Burns From 2005 through 2007, Saugatuck described how open source software would change the software industry, from how users buy and deploy business software to vendor business models and development strategies.In 2008, w ...

Author: Charlie Burns Previous Saugatuck research has articulated how user IT organizations are simultaneously being driven to reduce costs and to support increasingly dynamic and agile business processes. We have explained how, due to these forces, IT o ...

Author: Mark Koenig A pioneer in creating private social networking sites in government as well as large corporations, Neighborhood America may be in the right place at the right moment. After President-elect Obama’s successful use of social computing i ...

Authors: Sam Medina, Bruce Guptill This is the fourth Saugatuck CIO Perspective in a series on managing enterprise IT assets when both IT and business are disrupted by emerging technologies that do not – yet – fit into the enterprise IT portfolio. Part ...

Author: Mark Koenig Last week, within hours of each other, Google and Facebook announced general availability of competing versions of “connect” services: Google launched “Friend Connect” and Facebook launched “Facebook Connect.”  MySpace followed Tuesda ...

Authors: Mike West, Bruce Guptill Two segments within the overall category of small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) – those with fewer than 100 employees and those with 500-999 employees -- indicate the greatest growth in adoption and use of infrastructu ...

Author: Bruce Guptill On November 18 2008, Saugatuck Managing Director Bruce Guptill presented at and participated in the 2008 European SaaS Forum in Rotterdam, Netherlands. Organized by the Institute for International Research (IIR), the Forum included ...

Authors: Sam Medina, Bruce Guptill Previously-published Saugatuck research in October, 2008 presented a series of introductory models for managing enterprise IT assets when  both IT and business are disrupted by emerging technologies that do not – yet – ...

Author: Charlie Burns Previous Saugatuck Strategic Perspectives have framed a series of Key Issues for IT and business executives regarding cloud computing. Key Issues are forward-looking questions pertaining to technologies and markets that frame our re ...

Author: Bruce Guptill A pioneer in sales information management, with a system originally designed to capture and analyze sales collateral and market data from 13 IBM sales regions across Asia, SVA-BizSphere AG is implementing a two-pronged strategy. For ...

Author: Bruce Guptill Saugatuck Managing Director Bruce Guptill presented at and participated in the 2008 European SaaS Forum in Rotterdam, Netherlands, earlier this week. Organized by the Institute for International Research (IIR), the Forum included pr ...

Authors: Mark Koenig, Bruce Guptill In keeping with a promise to use the Internet to govern, United States President-elect Barack Obama introduced a weekly broadcast on YouTube this past weekend.  The original installment has already been viewed over 839 ...

Authors: Bill McNee, Mike West Last week, Saugatuck joined more than 300 analysts, bloggers and media professionals, and more than 9,000 customers, prospects and partners at one of the biggest and best run Cloud / SaaS conferences we have attended – Drea ...

Author: Mark Koenig Last week Saugatuck participated in Defrag 2008 in Denver, CO.  Thought leaders from vendors, users, and the analyst and blogger community convened at Defrag to explore how best “to augment the pace at which we achieve insights on raw ...

Author: Mike West Last week Salesforce held its sixth annual Dreamforce Conference at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, CA, with over nine thousand customers, prospects and partners in attendance.  Salesforce made several significant technology, partn ...

Authors: Mark Koenig, Mike West, Bill McNee This week, Saugatuck participated in two conferences – Defrag 2008, in Denver, CO and Dreamforce 2008, in San Francisco, CA.  Both conferences squarely addressed the challenges associated with the increasingly ...

Author: Bruce Guptill Saugatuck’s annual user executive survey of on-demand software and services provides data, analysis, and insight in a range of areas from SaaS to cloud computing to IT management. Our most recent data indicate a strong current deplo ...

Author: Sam Medina, Bruce Guptill Previously-published Saugatuck research presented a series of introductory models for managing enterprise IT assets when both IT and business are disrupted by emerging technologies that do not – yet – fit into the enterp ...

Authors: Charlie Burns, Bruce Guptill, Mike West On October 27, 2008 at its Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles, Microsoft announced Windows Azure and the Azure Service Platform. Microsoft introduced Azure as the foundation for delivering t ...

Author: Charlie Burns The current economic climate is likely to increase simultaneous demands on user IT organizations to be more responsive in supporting business processes and to reduce costs. In response to these demands, user IT organizations are: ...

Authors: Charlie Burns, Mark Koenig On October 20, 2008, Bluewolf, a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) consulting company, announced an expanded Integration-as-a-Service (IaaS) offering. Bluewolf claims its new offering, dubbed “Integrator,” is the only solut ...