Within Saugatuck we often have interesting internal debates about a wide range of industry issues. The one that came up Wednesday was Apple’s winning patent protection for the iPhone's graphical user interface for displaying electronic lists and documents. Wired ran a blog post by Christina Bonnington, “Apple Wins a User-Interface Patent That Smartphone Copycats Should Fear” that I picked up in Twitter and passed to my colleagues. Before I knew it, comments were flying fast and furious. I thought it would be informative, and entertaining, to share some of that internal debate with our blog readers.

Are software patents and copyrights a good idea?  Those who invest in the intellectual property seek some protection from the theft of their innovation and labors. As Apple CEO Tim Cook said at the D10 conference earlier this year, “From our point of view, it’s important that Apple not be the developer for the world.  We can’t take all of our energy and all of our care and finish the painting, then have someone else put their name on it.”

The shift away from 19th-century business organizations and 20th century IT is a shift toward boundary-free enterprises that requires significant change, fundamental change, in IT and business architectures and models. As we move from the pre-Cloud era into and through a relatively short transitory period that emphasizes a blending, hybridized IT environment, we have to consider the massive impact this shift has and will have on enterprise IT organizations. It will change the mission, roles, and goals of IT organizations not only as they transition now, but again in a few years as they shift toward even more, new, Cloud IT.

IT organizations will be challenged by the need for Cloud speed versus the need to avoid the stumbles that come with an accelerated approach. Starting with a comprehensive vision of enterprise Cloud use is key to achieving this balance, and to enabling the scale of guidance that business orgs and users will require to understand what they have, how to use it, and how to work with IT to achieve that.

IT and business leaders responsible for making sure that their investments don’t cripple their enterprise’s ability to do business should take a look at Mike West’s latest Strategic Perspective, which introduces Saugatuck’s Risk/Reward Assessment model.

We see this as the first approach to IT assessment that provides both buyers and providers with an objective, truly useful means to identify and then manage challenges in understanding, evaluating, selecting, and managing IT solutions in this new era of the Boundary-free Enterprise^™ and dramatically-altered IT/business master architectures, and the processes and practices needed to cost-effectively manage them.

What is Happening?  Like many mega-vendors, IBM is making serious investments in key trends and technologies driving the new Master IT architecture (Cloud / Mobile / Social / Analytics + Integration – see Research Alert 1054RA, published April 12, 2012), and the emergent Boundary-free Enterprise™. Several of these threads were on display and emphasized at the IBM Impact conference in Las Vegas, which Saugatuck participated in earlier this week – with a major focus around mobility, business integration and the importance of service architectures.

However, the biggest take away from the event for Saugatuck was a greater appreciation for what IBM is doing with its recently announced PureSystems family of integrated technology, and its potential to dramatically lower the costs of deploying, maintaining and managing new private Cloud workloads.

What is Happening?  Last week, Saugatuck attended the Wells Fargo Tech Summit in San Francisco, moderating a panel and meeting with a number of industry leaders. This was the second year that we participated in the conference – which we greatly value as another important window into the dynamics shaping the market for business computing products and services – in this case a Wall Street perspective.

Day 1 of the event was filled with an all-star cast of industry leaders. I especially valued John Chambers (CEO, Cisco) opening keynote, as well as the Consumerization of IT panel, Jason Maynard’s (Wells Fargo’s lead software analyst) fireside chat with Safra Catz (CFO, Oracle) – as well as the panel that I moderated on the Future of IT (with senior executives from Snaplogic, ServiceMesh, Deloitte and Nodeable). One of the highlights of the morning session was a short presentation by Biri Singh (Head of Cloud Services, HP), where he outlined at a high level HPs new holistic Cloud strategy that was subsequently announced this past Tuesday (see Saugatuck’s initial take in our Lens 360 blog post HP Cloud Update: Solid Strategy and a Top-down Mandate, 09Apr2012).