The news came out Friday as part of a flurry of SAP announcements. Another of those also relates to a departure – that of human resources chief Luisa Delgado, whose responsibilities will be taken on by CFO Werner Brandt – but the big non-quitting-related news is that SAP is consolidating its business to better reflect its newfound cloudiness.

SAP’s cloud “go-to-market” strategy will now all be under the purview of Bob Calderoni, CEO of Ariba (alongside SuccessFactors, one of SAP’s major cloud buys of the last two years). And development will all be under the control of technology chief Vishal Sikka.

SAP is pitching this new structure as an innovation accelerator, but does it finally signal a streamlining of the company’s sprawling and often confusing portfolio (a condition I like to call IBMitis)? Yes! And no.

As Sikka said on a conference call today:

“We see an opportunity to not only consolidate and streamline the portfolio, but bring incredible efforts… to transform that in the power of the cloud. We will get into areas that are truly unprecedented – applications for new industries that weren’t possible before [such as] healthcare, banking, oil and energy.”

Which is nice, but – as co-CEO Jim Hagemann Snabe chipped in – SAP has “a lot of commitments” to its existing customers too, and “we’re a company that stands by our commitments.” This may mean we should expect some redundancy within the portfolio to continue for a while yet, in order to keep those with more old-school SAP systems in place happy.

As for SAP’s ongoing cloud strategy, co-CEO Bill McDermott promised that Dalgaard’s exit would lead to “zero business disruption”:

“Our cloud DNA is now embedded across 65,000 minds and hearts and it’s become the soul of SAP. While it’s nice to have one evangelist for the cloud, it’s even better to have 65,000.

“Lars took us from $20 million in terms of revenue to a $1 billion run rate in the cloud. Now it’s about scale because everything is cloud. No other company has gone through this transition so fast – it literally happened in 12-15 months under his leadership.”

McDermott added that Dalgaard had been having “open conversations” with him and Hagemann Snabe for some time about his plans to downgrade his role to that of advisor. “This is nicest balance he could find in his personal life and we were happy to accommodate him because we think the world of the guy,” he said.

Speaking of SAP’s thorough cloudiness, the company also announced on Thursday that it would deliver its products – including, of course, those on the in-memory HANA platform — on VMware’s newly-re-announced vCloud Hybrid Service IaaS platform, as well as vCloud Suite. This will allow for fully managed services on-premise, in the cloud and in hybrid deployments.

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Yet that’s exactly what a group of researchers at the University of Illinois have created — a cradle that wraps around an iPhone and turns it into a biosensor that can detect, according to a university press release, “toxins, proteins, bacteria, viruses and other molecules.” Inside that cradle are about $200 worth of mirrors, lenses and a photonic crystal that the researchers claim can identify these substances as accurately as a $50,000 spectrophotometer in the lab.

The cradle is essentially there for support, though, while the phone’s camera and processor do the real work. With everything firmly aligned in front of the camera, a scientist would simply snaps a photo and the CPU processes the result. What it’s processing is the difference in wavelength that the photonic crystal, primed to react to a specific molecule, reflects. The team demonstrates the device and app in the video embedded below.

And if you’re into this type of mobile data collection, another group of University of Illinois researchers actually created a smartphone-powered water-pollution device called MoboSens

Like all things mobile or sensor, though — from SkinScan (now SkinVision) to health care apps like Ginger.io — the biggest value might come from data that has nothing to do with what the app is primarily measuring. Rather, when data about a certain condition, air quality or what have you is tagged with time and geodata, for example, it becomes the basis for mapping how situations are spreading or where there might be safe haven.

Imagine a team of scientists with iPhones dispersed throughout a city after a disaster, painting a real-time picture of what areas are most affected by a particular toxin (or maybe radiation). Taking a longer term approach, researchers could track how situations are evolving over time. Throw in even more data that smartphones are capable of detecting — temperature, ambient noise, vibration, etc. — and we might unlock entirely new ways to think about how diseases spread through the air or what conditions tend to favor the spread of foodborne bacteria.

In some ways, though, this is more than another cool thing you can do with a smartphone. It’s the furtherance of something we’ll discussing in depth at our Structure conference next month, which is how we rethink IT when computation and data are no longer bound within a single server or even the corporate network somewhere. The biological data this app will collect isn’t much use locked inside the phone; it needs a way to reliably and securely connect with other datasets and other services, likely distributed across the country or even the world. That’s where the real opportunity lies.

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Mike Vernal, Facebook’s director of engineering, said the integration of Parse technology could boost ad sales by making development of cross-platform mobile apps easier to build and run.

If a startup builds an iOS app with a way to connect into Facebook, great, but its reach is limited to the number of people with iOS devices. Then the developers have to start over to build a version of the app for Android and Windows Phone operating systems.

That’s where Parse comes in. As a provider of a Mobile Backend as a Service (MBaaS) with software-development kits for multiple operating systems, Parse lets developers quickly build out applications without having to worry about managing servers. When a startup expands its offering from just iOS to Windows and Phone and Android apps and drops them in app stores, promotion becomes important. Facebook can help with that, by getting ads in front of users. The ads expose the applications to the startup’s app, excite users and — here’s the important part — get more ad revenue.

Getting more from mobile has been a key area for Facebook, and that’s why the Parse deal begins to make more sense. This is particularly important following the mixed reception of Facebook Home.

Aside from being an ad revenue driver, Parse makes sense from a content perspective. Not every Facebook user updates his or her lists of favorite things and other fields, so enabling fresher content from more external sources is desirable; it could boost engagement. Facebook recently rolled out to all users the ability to be selective about what content third-party applications can push back to Facebook, and now users can confidently approve of this sharing of stories into the news feed and timelines through more and more apps that developers come up with.

Down the line, Facebook also wants to make this data more accessible through its newish Graph Search tool, Vernal said. That move would scratch another item off Facebook’s long Graph Search to-do list.

As for Parse, it will keep running the way it has been, Sukhar said, whether developers want to use Facebook as a means of promotion or not.

One unanswered question is what will happen to all the apps developers run on Parse. “It’s business as usual, so we’re actually staying on Amazon Web Services,” said Ilya Sukhar, a co-founder of Parse (pictured). But Facebook has a boatload of custom-built infrastructure. Couldn’t it just move Parse-backed apps to Facebook data centers, effectively turning Facebook into a quasi-cloud service provider? Apps will keep running on AWS “right now,” said Facebook’s director of product management, Doug Purdy. But the key words are “right now.”

Purdy made it clear that Facebook wants to just enable third-party developers to build and run apps that people can enjoy regardless of the device they choose. It turns out that’s in Facebook’s best interest, too.

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Here are my highly subjective highlights:

1: David Ortiz.

A (very fuzzy) David Ortiz at TechStars Demo Day.

There was a bona fide Big Papi moment on stage as the Red Sox superstar and overall Boston-superhero David Ortiz strode on stage to greet Fancred CEO Kash Razzaghi. This startup is building a “social platform” to connect sports aficionados with like-minded fans. Ortiz demanded that Rassaghi “get the Yankees off my cell phone.” (I dropped my phone but recovered in time to get one sub-par shot at left.)

Is there really room for a sports fan platform? Doubtful. But, hey, I’ve been wrong before. And did I mention DAVID ORTIZ???

2: A platform for sustainable, local food

I love the idea behind Freight Farms, which takes shipping crates and retrofits them with water, electricity,  internet access and LED lighting to convert them into compact hydroponic gardens.

The elegant idea is to “take the very structure that makes the global food supply chain possible and make it into a platform for producing local food,” said Brad McNamara, Freight Farms CEO.

Freight Farms CEO Brad McNamara.

They are remotely controlled and stackable which means they take up less real estate. Freight Farms has signed several customers including Katsiroubas Brothers,  a 100-year old Boston produce wholesaler, which is looking for ways to cut transport costs and offer more local product.

“There is nothing better than fresh local food, but the reality is food distribution is a long complicated supply chain — most goods travel 1,500 miles on average to get to your table,” said McNamara.

Freight Farm-grown crops require less water, no pesticides or herbicides. My question: Will their tomatoes taste like other hot-house tomatoes (i.e., like cardboard) or like an actual tomato? If it’s the latter, I’m totally sold.

3: DIY clothing design

In a nod to the burgeoning “maker movement” or do-it-yourself crowd, Mary Huang was to hand to talk up Constrvct, her startup that’s building service that lets you design 3-D clothing onscreen, tweak the size and styling with easy slidebar controls, preview your design on an onscreen mannequin and then make your clothes to order.

“Makers are underserved in the do-it-yourself market — they’re stuck at the same starting point as their grandmothers,” Huang said. Interest in home-designed clothes is rising thanks to Pinterest and Project Runway, she said, quoting a surprising stat: 3 million sewing machines sold last year, double the number from ten years ago.

4: Fixing manufacturing

LinkCycle says it can use its own data science — and existing data — to help manufacturing plants drastically cut their energy costs.

These facilities — many of them rust belt relics — are notorious for wasting energy and to remedy that many spend millions installing meters and hiring auditors to help. Most of that spending is also a waste, according to LinkCycle CEO Sahil Sahni.

“Why spend so much time gathering data when companies are already sitting on heaps of it?” he asked.

LinkCycle instead takes two existing data streams from the ERP systems already running these companies — electricity consumption and total production output. “We developed our own algorithms to take that data and use math — not meters — to save money without having to set foot in the plant,” he said.

Wow, that sounds so easy it makes you wonder why someone else hasn’t done it. Well except for that algorithm part anyway.

So, the new venue was fab but it suffered the same woe as past Techstars events — a lack of reliable connectivity. We soldiered through with personal hotspots and (finally) some intermittent Wifi connections but can’t one of these deep-pocketed sponsors finally figure out how to get reliable broadband into these events? (I’m  looking at you  Microsoft, Rackspace, Verizon and Softlayer.)

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While Box has been taking an industry-by-industry approach to enterprise adoption, the Crocodoc buy showed that Box is also serious about serving up a slick and intuitive consumer-grade user experience for the enterprise. The Folders deal is more proof of that, and offers important capabilities that keep Box competitive as enterprises let employees bring their own devices — many are iOS based — into the workplace.

Folders code viewer. Source: Folders

Users can also search files stored across Box, Dropbox or Google Drive. But perhaps this support for multiple clouds could fall away as Folders gets absorbed into Box — Google and Dropbox, after all, are key competitors against Box in the fight to be the Dropbox of the enterprise.

The Folders technology will be worked into “the next generation Box for iOS” that’s currently in the works, according to the Box blog post from Sam Schillace, Box’s vice president of engineering. (Schillace will talk with my colleague Derrick Harris at GigaOM’s Structure conference in San Francisco on June 20.)

The Folders app was designed by Martin Destagnol, the CEO of Reedian. It’s unclear how Reedian will be affected by the acquisition.

Even though getting enterprise adoption is important, in day-to-day reality, sometimes it’s the small things that matter to people. If enterprise employees see that they can open certain documents on their mobile phones, they might be less likely to get annoyed. And if employee discontent is minimal, companies could end up sticking with Box instead of flocking to other cloud-storage providers. The Folders deal looks like it will help Box move closer in that direction.

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A week after Google announced its Cloud Datastore, a managed NoSQL database, it’s cutting its price.

That means a 25 percent lower prices in some cases for both Cloud Datastore per se and Google App Engine’s High Replication Datastore (HRD), according to a Google blog post.

So that’s the latest cloud price cut, but it won’t be the last. Next up: Amazon? Microsoft?

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Joyent CEO Henry Wasik

San Francisco-based Joyent has made noises about going up against Amazon before  but now it’s more than tripled the number of instance types it will offer, including 7 different “standard” instance types with RAM allocations ranging from 0.5 to 128 GB; 5 high-memory instances; 6 high-CPU instances; 3 high-storage instances; and 3 high I/O instances (see chart.) But that’s just the beginning, said Joyent CEO Henry Wasik, who joined the company in November.

“We’ve completely reformatted what we do and dramatically expanded the number of instances — originally we had 10 and now 27, but once the portal is turned we’ll have 71,” said he said.

Depending on the workload, Joyent services may well be cheaper than AWS, he said. (Stay tuned for Amazon’s response.) But as many have pointed out, for cloud providers, competing on price alone is a fool’s errand.

Joyent seeks to differentiate itself on how well it runs high-performance applications on its own SmartOS (or on Linux or Windows);  the tooling it provides; its service and support; and its ability to offer the hybrid cloud option that many companies prefer.

Earlier this week Dell said it would offer Joyent as one of three public cloud options it will sell to customers. Dell had promised to deliver an OpenStack-based public cloud this year, but thought better of it.

Face it, in the cloud computing world, it’s Amazon first and then everyone else. In one of my favorite posts of the year comparing cloud providers to hamburger franchises, GigaOM’s Derrick Harris posited that AWS is McDonalds, Rackspace is Wendy’s but a handful of providers — Joyent, Virtustream, CloudSigma — represent the In-N-Out Burger (yum!) or Five Guys of cloud.  He wrote:

These cloud providers, like their analogous restaurant chains, are damn good at what they do and their patrons are loyal. They’re typically designed for maximum performance, maybe security, too, and will play around with new infrastructural or programming components in order to maintain their edge. They might even be the best at certain things and have some major customers (I’ve seen Maseratis leaving the In-N-Out drive-thru), but cost, geography or the desire to get a chicken sandwich, too, limit the number of users they can attract.

I know that we’re early on in cloud adoption and that the potential workloads moving to cloud is high. But to me it’s clear there will be a shakeout as enterprise players like VMware — which announced its public cloud option this week — along with Dell, IBM, HP and Red Hat try to preserve their traditional IT strengths in a cloud venue while newer look players  built for the cloud — Joyent, Virtustream, and others — gear up.

There may be a ton of work out there but i would bet that some of these players will not be standing in two years’ time.

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With offices in Israel and Palo Alto, Calif., ConteXtream was founded in 2007 and focuses on using software to help service providers virtualize network functions. It has picked up investments from Comcast Ventures and Verizon Ventures, among others. “You can imagine that those two investment arms are very interested in what we do,” said Nachman Shelef, ConteXtream’s CEO and a co-founder.

The customer’s total subscriber base is least double the number that the virtualized network covers, Shelef said, meaning that it could be either AT&T or Verizon, and given that Verizon has invested in ContexTream, it seems hard to imagine it would be selling services to its investor’s biggest rival, although Shelef wouldn’t say one way or the other.

Running ConteXtream’s Grid software on servers would allow a wireless carrier to more quickly roll out new revenue-generating features while also looking at traffic flows and directing certain subscribers only to the services they need, such as content filtering, customized billing, video optimization and subscriber statistics. “The old way of doing this was all the traffic goes through all functions, whether it needs to or not, without identifying each flow,” Shelef said. As a result, network appliances can be used more efficiently.

It’s a step toward the future of running all network functions as software on servers. “That vision is still very far off,” Shelef said.

Early SDN deployments have come from managed-hosting providers. Webscale deployments from Amazon and Facebook appear to be in the works. Enterprises have been slower to jump on board, even though many have expressed interest in SDN.

ConteXtream and other SDN vendors are eager to capitalize on the continuing hype cycle, and VMware is no exception to that, following its $1.26 billion acquisition last year of Nicira. Using software to virtualize networks is one component of VMware’s software-defined data center vision, which VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger will discuss with my colleague Om Malik at GigaOM’s Structure conference in San Francisco on June 19. Also at Structure, Juniper Networks executive Bob Muglia will talk SDN with GigaOM Research Analyst David Linthicum.

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“Being the CIO of a tech company is easy, you support 60,000 users and 59,999 think they have your job,” EMC executive vice president and COO  (and former CIO) Sanjay Mirchandani told attendees of the MIT CIO Symposium on Wednesday.

Here are the key takeaways from the conference.

1:  Learn to work well with others

Erik Brynjolfsson, director for Digital Business at MIT Sloan School of Management .

It’s a lesson we were all supposed to learn in grade school but too often IT staff and the business units beyond are not fully in concert. That’s got to stop.

CIOs are tired of being “the department of naysayers” and the best ones embed themselves in the business cases of the company. And they have to be active participants in business talks, not order takers for technology.

In the traditional model with CIOs, it was “come in and tell me what your requirements are — we need to get out of that we need to have the courage to participate in the process,” said Michael Loo, SVP of Global IT for Avaya.

2: Embrace big data but don’t be bedazzled.

Everyone is besotted by data. The more the better. A common mistake is to confuse correlation with causation, was another refrain. But without the right background knowledge and statistical analysis tools you can still leap to the wrong conclusions about your data.

“There’s a shocking correlation between lung cancer and people who have ashtrays at home,” said Andrew Lo, professor of Finance at MIT’s Sloane School of Management, to illustrate that point.

Alex “Sandy” Pentland, professor at the MIT Media Lab concurred. “Big data is good for interpolation, when you know the field you’re working in but can be bad for extrapolation where you’re entering new areas,” Pentland said.

3: Stop managing by gut

Having  said that, there is still no substitute for data and metrics, properly applied and analysed. Too often early in the war on cancer, medical research was hobbled by researchers’  tendency to let intuition drive their trials, said Dmitri Bertsimas, professor of operations research and statistics at MIT’s Sloan School. “We didn’t make a lot of progress,” he said.

“We need to change from opinions and hunches and go with facts and data,” agreed Erik Rynjolfsson, director of the MIT for Digital Business at the Sloan School.

4: Beware the HIPPO

Too often key business and tech strategic decisions are made by the HIPPO, aka the ”Highest-paid Person with an Opinion.” That person may big-foot a process where discussion and pushback are a better to go.

This is a term I first heard a few weeks ago at another industry event where Phil Swisher, chief innovation officer at Brown Brothers Harriman bemoaned this tendency of HIPPOS to dominate discussion. As The Boston Globe’s Scott Hirsner wrote:

Running experiments is much better than simply taking direction from a HIPPO, as politically difficult as that may be. “Hypothesis testing is better than hunches,” Swisher said.

5: Balance innovation with stability.

Remember, bleeding edge is bleeding for a reason.  Sometimes you do have to simply make sure the trains run on time, while hopefully making those trains better, faster, cheaper over time.

Kazuhiro Gomi, president and CEO of NTT America, knows from experience. “Many of our customers rely on us to run their systems for them and running things smoothly is sometimes more important than being innovative,” he said.

6: Beware the CMO

There’s been a lot of talk that chief marketing officers will control more of the IT spend than CIOs going forward. Michael Relich, EVP and CIO of Guess Inc., said he was well aware of the study which also said “CMOs and CIOs should be best friends.” That makes sense, he added, because CMOs need data and to get data they need things like point-of-sale systems and e-commerce sites which are, by the way, all about IT.

So, will CMOs get more IT spend then CIOs? According to Relich: “Over my dead body.”

Note: This story was updated at 6:04 a.m. May 24, 2013 to correct an attribution about CMOs getting more IT spend. Michael Relich of Guess Inc,. made the statement, not Avaya’s Michael Loo. I apologize for the error.

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The company announced a $20 million Series B venture funding on Wednesday, bringing the total raised to more than $26 million. Sequoia Capital led the new round, which also contains a contribution from Greylock Partners.

Along with highlighting problematic use across multiple cloud services, the Skyhigh software also lets IT administrators take steps to minimize impact of the rogue behavior by controlling access to certain clouds and encrypting data, which could make activity more secure. Cisco and Equinix use the Skyhigh product. Skyhigh wants to add more customers and also invest in marketing and engineering with the new funding.

The news falls in line with an increase in investments in security recently. In addition to the Skyhigh investment, Blue Coat Systems has announced plans to acquire Solera Networks, and McAfee said it would buy Stonesoft.

But shadow IT is just one challenge facing CIOs these days, along with the push to try cloud services and implement big data projects. My colleague Barb Darrow will discuss challenges like these with the CIOs of the Clorox Co. and the Pabst Brewing Co. at GigaOM’s Structure conference in San Francisco on June 19.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user alexmillos.

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