21 Jan, 2012

IBM Launches New Analytics Tools for Social Business

ARMONK, N.Y., Jan. 16, 2012 /PRNewswire/ — IBM (NYSE: IBM) today unveiled new software and services that delivers comprehensive networking capabilities to the increasingly social savvy workforce. Now, organizations can apply analytics to their social business initiatives, allowing them to gain actionable insight on social networking sentiment anytime, anywhere and put it to work in real-time.

IBM is announcing new cloud services and the next-generation of its social networking platform, IBM Connections. The new software incorporates sophisticated analytics capabilities, real-time data monitoring, and faster collaborative networks both inside and outside the organization through IBM’s SmartCloud services.

Now, organizations can integrate and analyze massive amounts of data generated from people, devices and sensors and more easily align these insights to business processes to make faster, more accurate business decisions. By gaining deeper insights in customer and market trends and employees’ sentiment, businesses can uncover critical patterns to not only react swiftly to market shifts, but predict the effect of future actions.

For example, marketing professionals can now gain real-time access to data that highlights patterns and consumer sentiment related to marketing trends and services allowing them to adjust campaigns on the fly. With one click, professionals can react to this insight by automatically creating a social network, on the fly, bringing together experts across geographical and market intelligence and swiftly respond to these insights.

The growing popularity of social networking is impacting the enterprise as the next-generation workforce expects more socially enabled applications at their fingertips. According to Forrester Research, the market opportunity for social enterprise apps is expected to grow at a rate of 61 percent through 2016, reaching $6.4 billion, compared with $600 million. At the same time, organizations are embracing social capabilities to transform virtually every part of their business operations, but lack the tools to gain insight into the enormous stream of information and use it in a meaningful way.

To address these challenges, IBM is delivering new software and cloud services that brings the power of analytics to the social business:

(+) New social analytics software that integrates wikis, blogs, activity streams, email, calendaring and more, and flags relevant data for action. It allows for instant collaboration with one simple click and the ability to build social communities both inside and outside the organization to increase customer loyalty and speed business results.

(+) New software that integrates social networking capabilities with enterprise content management to better connect people with information so they can make informed decisions and act quickly.

(+) The new IBM SmartCloud for Social Business simplifies access to business-grade file sharing, social networking, communities, online meetings, instant messaging, email and calendar. In addition, IBM SmartCloud for Social Business will deliver a cloud-based productivity suite allowing users to co-edit documents in real-time.

(+) New messaging and collaboration software that brings the power of embedded experiences to the Web and mobile devices providing a single point of entry for all business processes.

New clients, including employees of Kraft, Electrolux, MIT Lincoln Labs, Colgate-Palmolive, 3M, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Florida, Dutch Tax Office, Premier Healthcare and Brunswick and are among the users of IBM’s social software and collaboration services on premise, in the cloud and via mobile device.

“There is boundless opportunity for social business to transform how we connect people and processes, and increase the speed and flexibility of business,” said Alistair Rennie, General Manager, Social Business, IBM. “A successful social business can break down barriers to collaboration and put social networking in the context of everyday work, from the device or delivery vehicle of your choice, to improve productivity and speed decision-making.”

Also, IBM announced the beta of the next release of its industry-leading enterprise social networking platform, IBM Connections. IBM Connections delivers a wide range of capabilities, including wikis, blogs, activities, to help organizations collaborate on the fly. It includes the ability to access enterprise email, calendar and business tasks from inside the Connections platform, further unifying the collaboration experience.

The Connections landing page features a single location that allows users to view and interact with content from any third party solution through a social interface, right alongside their company’s content, including email and calendar. The embedded experience of the news feed, also known as an activity stream, is expected to allow employees from any department inside an organization to explore structured and unstructured data such as Twitter feeds, Facebook posts, weather data, videos, log files, SAP applications, electronically sign documents, and quickly act on the data as part of their everyday work experience.

For example, an employee could share a document with colleagues, approve a transaction from an SAP system, act on a notification required in a business process like an insurance claim, and share content such as status updates and files, all from IBM Connections. The embedded experience and single point of access allows users to have insight at their fingertips and share data from any place, whether on the road or in the office.

According to Forrester Research Inc., cloud computing will grow from a $41 billion business in 2010 to $241 billion in 2020. To address this growing opportunity, IBM is announcing IBM SmartCloud for Social Business. IBM is aligning its LotusLive services under the SmartCloud brand where it joins the ever-growing portfolio of business solutions that IBM delivers in the market that includes offerings in Commerce, Analytics, and industry-specific solutions like Smarter Cities.

The new service gives users one-click access to social networking, file sharing, online meetings, enterprise-class email, calendaring and instant messaging allowing clients to collaborate inside and outside the organization while pairing business transformation with the economic benefits of flexible cloud delivery models.

Additionally, a new capability of the IBM SmartCloud for Social Business is a cloud-based office productivity suite, IBM Docs. Now in beta and planned for availability in 2012, IBM Docs allows organizations, both inside and outside the firewall, to simultaneously collaborate on word processing, spreadsheet and presentation documents in the cloud to improve productivity. IBM Docs authors will be able to store and share documents in IBM SmartCloud, co-edit documents in real time or assign users sections of the document so they can work privately easing the management of multiple revisions from multiple authors in team-based documents.

Delivered in 22 languages, a 60-day trial of IBM SmartCloud for Social Business is available at no charge at ibmcloud.com/social.