What is Happening?  The components of the new Master Architecture have accelerated rapidly to a level of business relevance since we first described it last year (1052CLS, Boundary-free Enterprise™: Empowered by the New Master Architecture, 11Apr2012). Cloud, Mobile, Social, Analytics, and Integration (CSMA/I) have all become part of strategies for forward-looking IT organizations.

Saugatuck’s current research on the adoption and use of these same strategies indicates two important trends:

What is Happening?  This week has been full of Cloud Big Data and analytics announcements. From Intel to Microsoft, RedHat to VMware, IBM to Informatica, we’ve seen a series of rollouts, enhancements, extensions and open source contributions.

The consensus of Saugatuck’s discussions this week with provider and user enterprise executives is that the majority of provider activity consists of positioning themselves for future, expected opportunities; and the majority of user enterprise activity consists of interest, searches for knowledge, trials, and PoCs.

What is Happening?  After weeks of marketplace speculation, Dell Inc. has formally announced its intention to buy back its outstanding shares and privatize the company for approximately $24.4B. The move will take Dell off the NASDAQ stock exchange after more than 25 years of trading. The buy-out of the remaining shares will be executed by a consortium made up of CEO Michael Dell, his own investment fund, and Silver Lake Partners. The leveraged deal will be financed by loans from four banks, and by a $2B loan from Microsoft Corp. Michael Dell owns about 14 percent of the firm’s shares; he and other senior executives will retain their existing shares.

Saugatuck believes that Dell (the company) wants to, and needs to, coalesce itself into a Cloud-oriented services provider, and that remaining publicly-traded inhibits the company’s ability to accomplish this core change in a short enough time period to survive.

Bring your own technology (BYOT) – the practice of allowing employees to bring their own devices, applications, clouds, and services is expanding within the enterprise. Though at many companies the focus is still on devices, we see the associated host of other technologies as a close follower, complicating the tasks of enterprise IT to both plan for, and manage their own data security while still enabling work on these devices.

Going through the benefits and concerns that BYOT policies present, often looks like an argument that suggests an immediate ban on BYOT is the only viable solution. Though the reduction in capital expenses on the devices themselves might be compelling for some users, the added complexity of managing more types of devices and more data makes this seem like an uneven trade. Additionally, because the devices are not company owned, but still personal, the management of the device must be more subtle – meaning that the simple approach of complete device lockdown in not viable.

What is Happening?  Over the next year, we are expecting that IT will primarily focus its efforts on tactically-focused initiatives that will support enterprises’ ability to execute in the short term.

Given these limitations, many important long-term IT initiatives will, at best, remain “works in progress” through 2013, as more immediate concerns force CIOs to prioritize IT responsiveness and agility over the completion of strategically-focused initiatives.