Authors: Bruce Guptill and Lee Geishecker Discussions with CIOs and business strategists at Saugatuck’s recent Cloud Business Summit conference cemented the reality that, while Cloud concepts may not be new, the ways in which Cloud solutions are acquired ...

Authors: Bruce Guptill, Bill McNee and Lee Geishecker Earlier this week, Saugatuck hosted its inaugural Cloud Business Summit (see Note 1) in New York City, an invitation-only conference that brought together 125 senior business strategists and technolog ...

Authors: Lee Geishecker, Charlie Burns, Alex Bakker and Mike West Epsilon, a wholly owned subsidiary of Alliance Data and a top database marketing services provider, recently issued a press release regarding a recent data breach. Clients affected include ...

Author: Lee Geishecker Continuing on our theme of evaluating Cloud Business Solutions, this Strategic Perspective furthers this research with a framework that will help buyers evaluate providers and solutions at the intersection of Cloud IT and Business ...

Author: Lee Geishecker While Cloud-based CRM itself is nothing new, we find that many, possibly a majority, of first-time CRM buyers lack core insights to make informed and correct decisions. This Strategic Perspective presents a framework with key, init ...

Authors: Robert McNeill, Lee Geishecker, Bruce Guptill Enterprise software vendor Lawson Software, Inc. said on Friday March 14th that it had received an unsolicited takeover offer from rival midrange application software provider Infor, and Infor’s prim ...

Author: Lee Geishecker Saugatuck’s ongoing research into the progression of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) has yielded a number of insights into the challenges confronting adopters and vendors of Cloud IT. This Strate ...

Authors: Bruce Guptill, Bill McNee, Lee Geishecker IBM’s recent announcement of LotusLive partnerships with SugarCRM and Ariba bolster Saugatuck’s position that threat and promise of hybridized, traditional+Cloud IT is shaping aggressive, and non-trad ...

Author: Lee Geishecker The increasing popularity of consuming, and developing on, Cloud IT has created market opportunities for multiple categories of technologies and services that provide guidance in Cloud selection and assistance in Cloud adoption or ...

Authors: Bruce Guptill, Lee Geishecker and Alex Bakker The Apple Mac App Store was “opened” as an online marketplace on January 6, 2011 as part of the free Macintosh OS X v10.6.6 update for current Snow Leopard users. Within 24 hours of the opening, Ap ...

Authors: Lee Geishecker, Charlie Burns, Bruce Guptill In a move that clearly illustrates the emerging importance of Cloud IT to even the most traditional IT vendors – and another move toward the “Cloud and Hybrid” future for IT and IT providers – Dell Co ...

Author: Lee Geishecker More and more, user organizations understand the need for, and benefits of, Business Analytics as part of standard business processes and applications. This Strategic Perspective suggests that users and providers seriously look to ...

Author: Lee Geishecker On October 2st, 2010, IBM announced the acquisition of Clarity Systems, a privately held company headquartered in Toronto, Canada, and a leading provider of financial governance solutions. Clarity helps companies automate the proce ...

Authors: Robert McNeill, Bill McNee, Lee Geishecker On Wednesday, October 6, 2010, Accenture and Ariba announced that Accenture has agreed to acquire Ariba’s sourcing, services and business process outsourcing (BPO) services assets for $51 million, with ...

Author: Lee GeisheckerWe recently provided an insightful look at specific Procurement functions and business needs to bring a new dimension to the discussion surrounding business effectiveness enabled by Cloud business solutions. In this follow-up Strateg ...

Author: Lee Geishecker Saugatuck’s most recent research reveals that Procurement executives believe that Cloud business solutions (or SaaS) can significantly contribute to their success by helping them better manage their primary responsibilities. SaaS ...

Author: Lee Geishecker Recently, we published Strategic Perspectives on BI and CPM as they relate to the Cloud and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). In this Strategic Perspective, we focus specifically on the intersection of SMEs and BI / CPM in the Cloud. ...

Authors: Bruce Guptill, Lee Geishecker While Saugatuck is well-known for its survey research and analysis, our work really centers on interaction and dialogue with those who buy, sell, implement and use IT, especially in user enterprise settings. And dis ...

Author: Lee Geishecker Users need to be very cautious that they don’t rush into software decisions when moving to the Cloud. For example, user executives should not always assume that they will automatically stay with their current business applications ...

Authors: Lee Geishecker, Bruce Guptill In a recent Strategic Perspective, we presented four Key Issues that we see as important areas of inquiry in understanding Cloud Computing as it relates to Business Intelligence (BI), Corporate Performance Managemen ...