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.

New forms of behavior and organization continue to emerge from the evolving Boundary-free Enterprise™ as companies begin to realize the effects of mobility, communications and the ubiquitous internet. These forms of organization are of great importance to IT vendors and users alike, as they define new ways in which technology will be used. Like the technology that underpins them, they evolve continuously to meet new requirements, yet draw upon themes that have developed in the past. One area of importance is the growing use of Crowds and group dynamics across a wide range of behavior. While this has achieved recent attention as “Crowdsourcing” linked to innovation, Crowd behavior is occurring across a wide variety of important sectors, including collaborative work (where, arguably, it was begun in Open Source Software), Crowd funding, Crowd reporting, and across a range of innovation forms.

In all of this, it is important to distinguish Crowd from Social. Although Social Networking is a prerequisite to Crowd, it is fundamentally different. Social is about communication, and Crowd is about purpose. This being the case, the needs of most Social Networking can be met through informal exchanges of messages, and values lie in building networks and gaining or disseminating information. Crowd needs structure, because it must be established, the purpose must be set, format decided upon, actors need to have incentives to participate, participation rules and roles need to be established, results assessed, and the activity may need to be protected from dissolving into simple Social Networking, or worse, providing open access to information not intended for broadcast.

Where’s the business value of data? In its effective use.  In a Cloud-centric environment, that value is optimized by the efficient use of data within an integrative platform of software and services. And in a socially networked Cloud environment, that data can be at least as valuable as other intellectual property.  As such, social networking data alone can drive the acquisition of entire firms.

Less than a year ago – August 21, 2012 to be exact - Google purchased travel publishing brand Frommer's Travel from John Wiley and Sons for $22 million. It looked as though Google may be developing an online travel platform/portal service bundling Zagat and travel-optimized data management software firm ITA.