What is Happening?  As Saugatuck has been reporting for some time now, there is an historic change underway, building on the foundations of the Cloud transition. 2012 was perhaps the most dramatic year in ISV-to-Cloud and pureplay-Cloud startup activity, and the catalyst for this was the growth of Mobile, Social and Analytics platforms driving the evolution of the Boundary-free Enterprise^TM.

Why is it Happening? We have witnessed, and continue to witness, the shift from On-premises data processing to the Cloud and Hybrid-Cloud platforms that drive SaaS, PaaS and IaaS. We know Enterprise buyers have clearly indicated their preferences for deploying these Cloud and Hybrid solutions, and there appears to be a convergence of Cloud and Hybrid Cloud into a single buying and deployment preference (See Figure 1 – Cloud, Hybrid and On-premises Deployments: Note Cloud and Hybrid Convergence).

On February 21^st, several Saugatuck analysts attended an audio conference focused on the IBM MobileFirst announcement, during which IBM provided an update on their newly announced offerings, their views of the mobility market, and their market strategy.

IBM’s target for MobileFirst is, as the name implies, the rapidly growing mobility market which by some estimates already includes over one billion smartphones and 400 million tablets. But, the real importance of MobileFirst is not simply a large number of new products and services. While the new offerings are significant in both their depth and breadth (details can be found on IBM’s MobileFirst website), Saugatuck believes the true importance and the underlying challenge of MobileFirst lie elsewhere.

What is Happening?  A recent article in The New Yorker by Columbia University professor Tim Wu, author of The Master Switch, once again raises the question of whether technology providers perform better when they are “open” or “closed.” In his New Yorker article, Wu makes the claim that a tech provider generally does better when it is open, unless it is run by a genius (e.g., Steve Jobs) who can make faster, more proactive decisions that enable the company to move more nimbly and make fewer market mistakes.

While we agree that companies have historically exhibited the characteristics and capabilities Wu describes, overall we believe that a confluence of market shifts, changes in buying patterns, and the emergence of a new master Business and IT architecture - driven by Cloud, Mobile, Social, and Analytics (CMSA), stitched together with Integration - presents a means of bypassing this debate of open vs. closed in a very real way – in short, Saugatuck’s Boundary-free Enterprise™ (BfE) model.

Last week’s unveiling of BB10 and Blackberry’s newest devices was more like a confirmation than an unveiling. “Well-leaked” is one way of describing RIM’s approach to today’s event. RIM has made sure that influencers and partners know exactly what they’re doing.

And frankly, it is some impressive stuff. Cool-looking design; decently-engineered OS; reasonable UI; decent-sized app store and developer support network.

What is Happening? — Over the past year, our survey and interview research among IT buyers, users, and managers, and research work with IT vendors and services providers, has helped shine some light on several trends that we expect will become widely apparent, and disruptive to the business of IT, within the coming year.

The driving force behind these is the continued, and accelerating, emergence of the Boundary-free Enterprise™ - a framework and architecture based on loosely-coupled IT and Business services, technologies, and operations that are in turn enabled and driven by Cloud-based innovation. That innovation continues to evolve in unanticipated ways through the increasingly intertwined uses of Cloud, Mobile, Social/Collaborative and Analytics technologies, devices, and services, often in unusual synergies, and always in transformative ways that herald new ways of doing business shorn of the old limitations of time-of-day and physical place.