This week, I head out to San Francisco for the SIIA’s annual All About the Cloud (AATC) conference, where I will deliver a featured presentation on Day 1 of the event, and participate in the closing analyst panel on Day 2 – and where we have a schedule of more than 15 client meetings lined up.  

But before I go, I wanted to share highlights from a terrific briefing that we had last week with Adaptive Planning – who is clearly in break-out growth mode.   Not only is the firm growing at a 80 percent plus annualized clip (up from 50 percent in 2011), while remaining cash-flow positive, they have plenty of powder still dry from their early 2012 venture financing led by Norwest Venture Partners – with about $20 million of the $22 million still in the bank.

What is Happening?  A new Saugatuck Strategic Research Report spotlights the accelerating changes in known and unknown IT and business requirements, while laying out a framework for seeing, understanding, and managing this often-underestimated shift in how, where, when, why, and by whom business is done – and how IT groups overall are likely to become larger while changing roles and responsibilities.

Titled Saugatuck’s Boundary-free Enterprise™ Model: Concept, Impacts, and Guidance, the 30 page report – released to Saugatuck research clients earlier this week – lays out a simple, repeatable, and useful framework for seeing, identifying, and understanding the changes that are underway in practically every type and size of enterprise, in every market worldwide: The shift from traditional IT and business structures and operations to a less-defined, loosely-coupled, hybridized environment best regarded as the “Boundary-free Enterprise™” – with all the business and IT management challenges that phrase implies.

A recent market report from IDC got us talking with our provider clients about a scenario concerning the impact that ubiquitous Mobility will have on the typical enterprise, its markets, its providers, and of course the consumers who drive all business.

Not only is Mobility growing faster than most enterprises can manage, its force looks ready to accelerate much more massive business and IT change. It’s one thing to know that a train is coming; it’s another to know when to get on the train, and where it will take you.

What is Happening?  The development of mobile platforms and their attached ecosystems by Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Blackberry has created a new competition within IT, in which vendors and mobile platforms themselves fight for mindshare and user share. The network effects that each ecosystem gains from this competition drives more value to each provider’s ecosystem. Thus, reinforcing each against the others in a highly competitive market.

However, this view does not incorporate all of the possibilities, as was aptly demonstrated by Facebook’s rollout of its “Home” app, and the resulting (some might say “looming”) potential for phones to follow servers and PCs into virtualization at both an application and potentially hardware levels. While the Big Four above continue to dominate the mobile OS space, their situation among consumer and enterprise demands is far from predictable.

What is Happening?  Ongoing inquiries from Saugatuck clients are a prime driver of our research. One of the areas under greatest scrutiny by both our CIO and IT provider clients right now is Mobility, with inquiries regarding a wide range of mobile IT evolution, market trends, services, providers, and especially impact on user enterprises. This Research Alert presents information and insight from client inquiries on enterprise Mobility adoption, use, and management since January 2013.

In that timeframe, the vast majority of Mobility-related inquiries have focused on two enterprise aspects: CIO mobility management concerns, and mobile business applications likely to be the most influential/disruptive for the enterprise.