Just last week, we noted that this year’s SAPPHIRE event really crystallized SAP’s positioning and strategy as regards not just Cloud, but the entire company (1218RA, SAPPHIRE 2013: SAP is HANA, HANA is SAP, and the Enterprise Software Future is Not the Past, 16May2013).

The bottom line: SAP knows that in order to remain not just relevant, but dominant, it must reinvent itself from the inside out. The news this past year has been mostly about how the company is reinventing its offerings – i.e., their “outside” reinvention.

What is Happening?  If it’s May, Saugatuck must be participating in SAP’s annual Sapphire user and partner event. And if we’re talking about SAP, we must be talking about what they said they would do, and what they have actually done.

Here’s what we said last May about SAP, Cloud, and the company’s business model:

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?  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.