The Boundary-free Enterprise™

What is it?

We are now witnessing the emergence of a new master architecture that is not based on a single computing-platform paradigm but rather on multiple technologies and platforms that build synergies among themselves through loosely-coupled and opportunistic exchanges of value.

Today’s businesses and individuals are less encumbered by constraints of time and place, doing their work through a new array of time- and location-independent computing capabilities – Cloud, Mobile, Social and Data Analytics (CMSA) plus Integration – that make the Boundary-free Enterprise™ possible. Integration is the glue that links these capabilities together and joins them to on-premises data assets in data centers where mission-critical money systems still operate behind highly-secure firewalls.

What we envisioned in 2008 (when we first outlined / framed our vision of the Boundary-free Enterprise™) is fast becoming reality in 2012. Though no two Boundary-free Enterprises™ are exactly alike, businesses now have begun to reconfigure how computing resources are deployed to take advantage of anytime / anyplace hybrid computing through an emerging master architecture depicted in Figure 1 below:

Figure 1 - Emerging Master Architecture

Expectations of creating a dominant Cloud platform today, as Microsoft was able to do in the PC era, are completely unrealistic. In the Cloud no single provider can possibly fulfill all computing needs or achieve complete control because of the unlimited diversity of potential functionality accessible via integration. Consequently, successful Cloud solutions will interoperate with as many other solutions as possible in order to enable the aggregate value from their combined utility. This is one of the defining characteristics of Cloud value – and the emerging master architecture – for the Boundary-free Enterprise™.