IBM's new social business solutions to drive profit

Using the IBM Connect 2013 platform where thousands of their employees, partners and customers descend every year, the company today announced new software and cloud-based services to help organizations transform with the adoption of social business technology. 

Reaching out to the attendees, Alistair Rennie, general manager, Social Business at IBM, said, "Business leaders, such as chief marketing officers and chief human resource officers will advance their business by integrating social networking and analytics technologies into their business processes to empower the 21st Century workforce and transform client experiences."

The new social software offerings will help companies gain deeper insights into big data generated through the use of social networks. Organizations applying analytics to their data for competitive advantage are more likely to substantially outperform their industry peers.

Today, leading organizations, including 61 percent of the Fortune 500, are using social business technologies from IBM to transform their front office business operations. This includes connecting employees globally to empower faster decision making and analyzing big data from sources such as Twitter, Facebook, blogs and public forums, to react swiftly to customer trends and outpace competitors.

According to industry analysts, social business is an emerging business category, with the social technology industry growing to $6.4 billion by 2016. At the same time, social media and predictive analytics have emerged as indispensable tools for CMOs, who are using technology to make the customer experience more intelligent, intuitive and individualized. In another study, 82 percent of CMOs say they plan to increase their use of social media over the next three-to-five years to communicate with their clients.

The new software and cloud-based services include a new Web-based social networking platform for HR heads for recruiting and inducting new employees, and giving employees access to digital media and data in real-time, enabling faster decision making. This announcement follows IBM's $1.3 bn acquisition of Kenexa in December 2012. The IBM Employee Experience Suite will help HR managers attract, empower and motivate talent to address skill and resource gaps while enabling their workforce to deliver better results for their clients.

For example, employees can use social networking, e-meeting and instant messaging capabilities to access applications and interactive rich media such as videos, resulting in improved collaboration and greater teaming across globally distributed teams. Another service helps marketing teams design advertising campaigns and quickly publish those campaigns to leading social networks. This release of the social networking platform will further enable IBM users to access and analyze big data from inside and outside the organization, including Facebook, Twitter, audio and video.

Already in beta, IBM is also announcing its plans to release the industry's first truly social email client incorporating file sharing, activity streams and a simplified user interface. This will be the first major release of Notes and Domino in five years.

To be available in March 2013, IBM Connections 4.5 will include embedded document management capabilities so that members of a network can access, analyze and act on wide ranges of data types in the context of their work to improve decision-making and business results. IBM Connections' Content Manager feature will allow teams and communities to harness an organization's collective intelligence to solve business problems, increase productivity, and drive profit. IBM also announced that it expects to ship IBM Notes and Domino edition 9 in March 2013, which will have a social email client and delivers a social experience to users, whether using a browser or on the broadest range of mobile devices.

IBM Notes and Domino are used by more than half of the Fortune 500. IBM mobile capabilities manage and support a variety of platforms, including Apple (iOS 6), Android, Microsoft Windows operating system, including Windows and Blackberry smartphones (including BlackBerry 10).