What is Happening?  The emergence of the Boundary-free Enterprise™ is clearly reshaping what it takes to be a successful Cloud ISV.  Not only are today’s Cloud-savvy Enterprise buyers looking for new kinds of solutions that often make innovative use of Mobile, Social and Advanced Analytics, but the pace of disruptive change is demanding that Cloud ISVs rethink and refine many aspects of the core business.

This Research Alert – drawing on the Feature Presentation that Saugatuck CEO Bill McNee delivered at the SIIA’s All About the Cloud (AATC 2013) conference earlier this week – highlights the key trends framing business computing today, as well as how Enterprise buyer demand is evolving, including Cloud solution deployment preferences and timeframes.

Despite the unresolved status of Dell’s proposed leveraged buyout – still on hold after three months of market machinations from Carl Icahn and the Blackstone Group – Dell announced the acquisition of Enstratius this week.  Enstratius offers software and services to manage application provisioning and scaling, application configuration management, usage governance, and cloud utilization monitoring across public, private and hybrid Clouds. Enstratius currently supports more than twenty public and private Clouds.

Dell’s Software Division, under the management of former CA CEO John Swainson, has built an impressive portfolio of security and systems management solutions, largely through acquisition (see list below).

When Saugatuck first looked at Windows Azure – including conducting a series of interviews with System Integrator (SI) and ISV developers of over 125 Cloud solutions in the early adopter wave – it was a comparatively primitive platform positioned somewhere between IaaS and PaaS. At the time, I thought it was clever to say it was “half PaaS.”

However, times have changed, and the Windows Azure platform has matured significantly. Microsoft has relentlessly enhanced and extended its capabilities over the past five years. Today it is a fully-functioning platform with enterprise-worthy performance and a solid platform for ISVs deploying their solutions to the Cloud. To provide some idea of the extreme of processing power that Windows Azure can enable, I recommend you consider the Milliman case study.

This week, I head out to San Francisco for the SIIA’s annual All About the Cloud (AATC) conference, where I will deliver a featured presentation on Day 1 of the event, and participate in the closing analyst panel on Day 2 – and where we have a schedule of more than 15 client meetings lined up.  

But before I go, I wanted to share highlights from a terrific briefing that we had last week with Adaptive Planning – who is clearly in break-out growth mode.   Not only is the firm growing at a 80 percent plus annualized clip (up from 50 percent in 2011), while remaining cash-flow positive, they have plenty of powder still dry from their early 2012 venture financing led by Norwest Venture Partners – with about $20 million of the $22 million still in the bank.

What is Happening?  A new Saugatuck Strategic Research Report spotlights the accelerating changes in known and unknown IT and business requirements, while laying out a framework for seeing, understanding, and managing this often-underestimated shift in how, where, when, why, and by whom business is done – and how IT groups overall are likely to become larger while changing roles and responsibilities.

Titled Saugatuck’s Boundary-free Enterprise™ Model: Concept, Impacts, and Guidance, the 30 page report – released to Saugatuck research clients earlier this week – lays out a simple, repeatable, and useful framework for seeing, identifying, and understanding the changes that are underway in practically every type and size of enterprise, in every market worldwide: The shift from traditional IT and business structures and operations to a less-defined, loosely-coupled, hybridized environment best regarded as the “Boundary-free Enterprise™” – with all the business and IT management challenges that phrase implies.