I believe that the unique, no-nonsense approach of CBR is valuable because very often new technology trends are hard to clearly define and pinpoint early on."

— Gabriele Piccoli, Editor

This issue of Cutter Benchmark Review represents a classic example of what we attempt to do every month with this publication. We identify emergent, emerging, or consolidating trends of great interest to IT shops around the world, and then we bring to bear the many components of the "CBR machine" to benchmark them and provide tangible guidelines that our readers can immediately implement in their day-to-day operations. There are two critical components to our operation here at CBR: our expert contributors and the Cutter Consortium office. The office manages the madness that is putting together the monthly issue of a survey-based journal that benchmarks current trends with fresh data, including managing the survey creation process, collecting and organizing the questions produced by our experts, computing results, and editing and publishing the issue.

As you know if you are a regular CBR reader, we draw our expertise from the complementary communities of academia and practice. Specifically, I prowl the halls of academia in search of university researchers who have a long-range view of the trend we have selected and who are doing interesting and rigorous work in the area. The academic contributors enable us to put the phenomenon in context and lay a foundation for benchmarking it before commenting on current data. The Cutter Consortium office looks for practicing consultants — from within or outside the Cutter family — who are out in the trenches working daily on the specific problems we look to address. Thus, our contributors lay out the topic; tell us what we know and don't know about it, how it relates to previous trends, and what pressures and interests surround it; and typically offer a framework for us to use in making sense of the trend. They also react to the survey results and draw actionable guidelines for our readers. It is the positive tension between these two viewpoints, with the catalytic role of timely survey data, that makes CBR a uniquely balanced and honest tool for understanding and managing emerging IT trends.

The unique production approach of CBR is particularly useful with a topic like cloud computing and software as a service (SaaS) where the hype potential (i.e., hype danger) surrounding the trends is significant. This is in part due to what I call the "marketing-ization" of IT: the pressure to continually innovate and, at times, put old wine in new bottles. But I believe that the unique, no-nonsense approach of CBR is valuable also because very often new technology trends are hard to clearly define and pinpoint early on. In such a case, the positive tension native to a CBR issue can be extremely valuable in stimulating your own thinking about the manifestations of these trends in your specific organizational domain.

This issue on cloud computing and SaaS focuses on one of the hottest trends in IT today. We tackle this topic with our tried-and-true CBR approach: no rhetoric, no hype, and a solid understanding of "today's new thing" that is based on our contributors' decades of experience in the fast-moving IT world. Helping us from the academic side are Aurelio Ravarini, Director of CETIC, Research Center on Information Systems/Senior Assistant Professor of Information Systems, and Luca Mari, Professor of Electrical and Electronic Measurement, Università Carlo Cattaneo (LIUC, Italy). Aurelio and Luca have been following the trend toward the paradigm of IT as a utility since its inception and through its many definitions and evolutions, from postmainframe client-server architectures to application service provision to cloud computing. Our contributor from the practice side is Jeff Kaplan, a Senior Consultant with Cutter's Sourcing & Vendor Relationships practice and founder of THINKstrategies, a strategic consulting company focused on the migration of the technology industry from a product-centric to a services-driven business model.

Aurelio and Luca trace a brief history of computing science trends and their potential for being hyped up. They then focus most of their analysis on SaaS after tackling a definitional issue and attempting to distinguish SaaS and cloud computing. Aurelio and Luca analyze the survey data, organizing their discussion around five principal theses. They conclude their contribution with actionable guidelines.

Jeff also attempts to resolve the definitional difficulties around the concepts of cloud computing and SaaS. He then discusses the enablers and drivers behind the SaaS and cloud computing trends, as well as the process by which customer acceptance evolves over time. Jeff has been tracking the evolution of SaaS for years now and has produced a number of reports for Cutter. He brings this depth of knowledge and longitudinal trending opportunity to the pages of his contribution. With this solid basis in place, Jeff comments on the survey results. He focuses particularly on adoption decisions and implications of the new trends for the competitive landscape.

There is no doubt that the organizational computing paradigm is increasingly influenced by the software utility approach. The growing robustness of the network, coupled with the proliferation of hosted solutions and increasing understanding of how to manage it, provides grounds to be optimistic about continued growth in this area. Despite the generally positive and upbeat outlook for SaaS and cloud computing, there are a number of risks and pitfalls that must be carefully managed in order to exploit the potential offered by the emerging paradigm. Our contributors offer important insight that will help you assess the risks as they manifest themselves in your specific context. That's the value of CBR.