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.

Saugatuck clients tend to be leading-edge user and provider firms looking for the latest intelligence to give them an edge in emergent IT and business environments, and there’s not much today more interesting to them than the combination of social and mobile IT (a.k.a. SoMo) in the enterprise. The latest Strategic Perspective from Alex Bakker examines synergies between mobile devices and social software, and proposes several potential use cases for the mobile/social duopoly within the enterprise.

Savvy IT leaders, for example, need to focus on generating specific use cases which will bring value to their business. Sample use cases, which take advantage of the broader feature-set available on modern smartphones and tablets, include the following:

The term and concept of “Collaborative Commerce,” though critically important to enterprises’ increasing focus on improving business operations and profitability, is in danger of becoming a marketing meme rather than a manageable set of solutions and operations. A new Strategic Perspective for Saugatuck CRS clients tackles this by presenting a model and description of how Collaborative Commerce needs to be modeled on commercial interactions between and within enterprises, rather than focused on one or a few sets of inter-enterprise transactional communications.

Bu just naming the thing does not control it, or make it tame. To work, Collaborative Commerce must be more than a recognizable solution or service; it must be enabled and empowered by organizational, hierarchical change. Buying and using the software or service is merely a beginning that will spotlight and highlight just how complex commercial interactions are – and where the opportunities are for enterprises (and Collaborative Commerce providers) to improve their management.

Clients of Saugatuck’s Continuous Research Service (CRS) have been following our work on Collaborative and Social IT since 2008. Over the past several months, Saugatuck clients have been expressing increased interest in our take and guidance regarding Collaborative Commerce – a term that has been popularized by Ariba, but one that we find is widely used throughout IT and business markets. And our just-closed 2012 Business Applications/SaaS user survey indicates that Collaborative Commerce is quickly becoming one of the most compelling types of Cloud-based and hybridized business solutions, in terms of user enterprise interest and investment. In short, we see the initial rise of Collaborative Commerce among leading enterprises, and are moving to make sure that our clients have the most valuable insight and guidance available.

This blog post is to announce that Saugatuck is formalizing the addition/extension of Collaborative Commerce within our Collaborative/Social IT research programs. What this means for our clients is expanded focus, research, analysis and guidance in understanding the whys and wherefores of this increasingly-important, influential, and often-disruptive aspect of IT, including guidance in planning, solution and provider assessment, selection, implementation, and ongoing management for optimization and integration of Collaborative Commerce into daily IT and business operations. In addition to our standard frameworks and guidance, clients will be able to access selection, implementation, and management case studies, as well as insights from our regular briefings with providers - including Ariba, GXS, IBM, Infor, Oracle, SAP and others.

After conducting a careful examination of websites and public marketing information from ten leading vendors of Social Business IT solutions aimed at internal collaboration, we found that very little was clear from them about what the likely business benefits would be from those solutions. Strategic Perspective 1019MKT examines some current marketing emphases of existing Social Business IT platforms and highlights the difficulties that this nascent industry is having explaining its own value.

What we don’t see is use cases that clearly articulate business benefits. There is very little relevant information about why a prospective buyer would choose any specific Social IT product. As we have previously written, there is very little competitive differentiation in this market, and feature lists do not educate the buyer or make solution or provider selection easier (995MKT, The Value in Social Business IT Addressing: Three Suggestions for Making It Work, 15 December 2011).

What is Happening? Saugatuck’s survey data analysis indicates that small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) are focusing a much larger percentage of their Social Business IT investments on customer-focused applications than are larger enterprises. The data indicate, in fact, that the smaller a company is, the greater proportion of its Social Business IT investments will be focused on customer-oriented applications. Figure 1 summarizes the data from Saugatuck’s 2011 Social Business IT survey (for more on our Social Business research program, please see Note 1).

Figure 1: Bigger Firms = Broader Social IT Focus

There should be no question that the phenomenon of “social business” is fully fledged and driving tremendous disruption within user enterprises, as well as tremendous growth opportunities for Cloud-based IT and communications services providers.  Facebook, twitter, FourSquare, IM &SMS, mobility and more all are indicating and influencing the trend toward more “business interaction with transactions.”

As one of the most telling predictors of how and where social business will evolve and disrupt IT markets, Saugatuck offers an often-overlooked percentage of the IT user population: Gamers. And it’s not just the kids we should be watching to understand user environments and expectations – it’s their parents. And how will they affect the evolution of social business IT (and its use)? Let’s count the ways:

On 19 July two Saugatuck analysts participated in a briefing in which ServiceNow, a provider of SaaS-based ITSM software, provided an update on their offerings, their perceptions of their market, and insights into their strategy.

ServiceNow’s primary target market entails supplementing or replacing on-premises offerings from traditional vendors such as BMC, CA, HP, IBM, etc. The longevity of the traditional offerings provides both a challenge and an opportunity for ServiceNow. The challenge is that due to the longevity of the offerings, IT management processes are tightly interwoven and inter-dependent with the offerings. The opportunity consists of factors such as the amount of effort required for many IT shops to upgrade the traditional offerings.

What Is Happening? — The Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston this week included and examined a wide range of emergent and disruptive IT types, with a baseline message that “we ain’t seen nothing yet.”

Session after session noted and emphasized that while the applications are legion, the devices are powerful, and the deployments can be exciting and productive, much of what we see in the marketplace today is still experimental. Enterprise IT leaders and technology / service providers alike emphasized the dynamic and changing nature of Cloud-enabled social, mobile, and collaborative IT, and the management challenges that they incur severally and in combination.

What is Happening? — In a deal that almost perfectly illustrates the interwoven, Cloud-driven nature and approaches of business software and workflow in the 21st century, IT virtualization and management Master Brand VMware announced on Tuesday May 31 its acquisition of collaborative / social business software and service provider Socialcast.

Socialcast is described on its website as “an enterprise collaboration platform built on activity streams that unites people, data and applications in real-time.” The company provides microblogging services tailored to workgroups and process management within enterprise business applications.

It’s not just better, faster, cheaper that makes the Cloud so attractive.  It’s what you can do with it.  New stuff, like spanning geographies, melting time zones like butter on a hot stove.  The Cloud brings entirely new capabilities to a business, as Kamesh Pemmaraju observes in his blog post on Sandhill.com.

The past few weeks at Saugatuck we’ve been having business discussions with a company in India, hours and hours away. As we’re waking up with a cup of coffee, they are heading home from work. But with Web collaboration tools, we can be sharing documents, making plans, and moving our businesses ahead.  And collaboration is just one of the powerful and unique features of the Cloud. Bill McNee’s opening keynote at the Cloud Business Summit on May 10 in New York will bring into focus how the Cloud is helping to transform businesses and drive new revenue through the creation of Cloud‐enabled business services.  And he is joined at the Summit by business and IT leaders like Rick Nucci, Founder and CTO, Dell Boomi, Christopher Perretta, Executive Vice President, Chief Information Officer, State Street Corporation, James Powell, Executive Vice President and CTO, Thomson Reuters, Ellen Shepard, CIO, Teach for America, Evangelos Simoudis, Managing Director, Trident Capital, and Michael Wilens, President, Corporate Operations and Technology, Fidelity Investments.