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.

What is Happening?  This year’s IBM Connect event – formerly Lotusphere – clearly affirms and confirms IBM’s company-wide and –deep commitment to the inextricably intertwined IT and business realities of Cloud, Mobile, Social, Analytics, and Integration.

The event’s over-arching theme of “Social Business” established two years ago has taken hold and permeates IBM’s product and service positioning and messaging. We see IBM’s key positioning tenets of “Social Business,” “Innovation,” and “Transformation” continually carrying the message to the attendees.

In a move that reinforces its repositioning away from low-margin, low-influence networking and IT markets, CSCO has just announced the pending sale of its Home Networking Business Unit (mostly Linksys) to Belkin, a private company based in Playa Vista, Calif. CSCO will keep a few fingers in the pie, however; the official release states that “Belkin and Cisco intend to develop a strategic relationship on a variety of initiatives including retail distribution, strategic marketing and products for the service provider market.”

The Linksys/Belkin announcement comes within hours of CSCO’s announcement of intent to pay approximately $475 million for Israel-based Intucell Systems, which makes self-optimizing network (SON) software. Currently coded for mobile operators and carriers, Intucell’s software enables advanced, real-time, Big-Data-crunching analysis, configuration and management of network bandwidth and traffic. This is a big deal for CSCO as it seeks to extend its presence and dominance in telecom networking markets. But this type of software also enables similar offerings for hundreds, if not thousands, of Cloud services providers and enterprise networks seeking dynamic, inexpensive, effective, and self-healing network management capabilities.

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: