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.

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.

What is Happening? — An under-emphasized but omni-present theme throughout this week’s IBM Software Group (IBM SWG) Analyst Insights event in Stamford, CT was that of the primary role being played by Mobility in driving not just Cloud use and business value, but in driving Business and IT leaders to work more closely together than ever before.

To be clear, there was no shortage of discussion and presentation regarding the importance and role(s) of Mobility within IBM’s software and services strategies and portfolios. Mobility is important enough that IBM SVP Robert LeBlanc specifically called out Enterprise Mobility as one of IBM SWG’s seven core, strategic customer enterprise needs and solution areas. Additional presentations and discussions with LeBlanc and other executives, including IBM GM for Applications & Integration Middleware Marie Wieck, and IBM GM for Security Systems Brendan Hannigan, further emphasized the strategic importance of Mobility within IBM SWG.

What is Happening? — Saugatuck Technology research among enterprise business and IT executives makes clear one of the most substantial and disruptive trends seen since the advent of the Web, email, and distributed computing:

The pace of Cloud-driven business innovation is outstripping even the accelerating pace of IT innovation – and therefore is outpacing the abilities of established IT and business management organizations and structures.

What is Happening? — As 2012 marches to a close, a new focus on the enterprise Finance function is clearly taking place – with a range of viable and powerful Cloud-based solutions coming to market in support of upper-mid and large enterprises.

As our ongoing buyer demand research has consistently highlighted, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Collaboration (and to a lesser extent Social Networking) have clearly led in terms of early Cloud customer adoption (Wave I as shown in Figure 1). Following this flow, upper-mid-sized and large enterprises have begun to steadily embrace Cloud-based Human Capital Management (HCM) solutions over the past two years (Wave II), as the first of several “core” systems of record being adopted in the Cloud.