IBM announced an expansion of its software to help organizations embrace the power of social business by delivering IBM Connections social networking platform.
IBM has expanded its social business
initiative with the release of its new IBM
Connections software, which Big Blue identifies as a social networking platform
with real-time compliance capabilities.
IBM
launched its social business strategy at the company's Lotusphere 2011
conference in February as a way to help its customers and partners leverage
social networking and social paradigms to their benefit.
The new
IBM
Connections software allows organizations to track and trace data on the
fly throughout their organizations. This information can be analyzed and is
discoverable in real-time using the IBM Connections active compliance service
versus waiting until day end for analysis, IBM officials said.
The adoption of social software is on the rise and rapidly becoming a vital
business tool, enabling organizations to transform virtually every part of
their business operations from marketing, customer service and sales, to
product development and human resources. The market opportunity for social
platforms is expected to grow by a factor of nearly two billion worldwide by
2014, according to IDC.
Moreover, Gartner recently
said that "by the
end of 2013, half of all companies will be forced to produce material from
social media websites for e-discovery so enterprises need an overall governance
strategy for all applications and information."
The new IBM Connections 3.01 software
uses microblogs, wikis, communities and activities to collaborate with clients,
partners and employees.
The social networking platform delivers enterprise-quality compliance
capabilities providing the ability to monitor, track and quickly pull out
relevant data around conversations, posts and file uploads in real-time. This
electronic trail of online interactions helps organizations meet their policy
needs while working at the speed of social networking.
IBM plans to provide these industry
agnostic compliance capabilities for clients through a collaboration with
Actiance, a leader in compliance
capabilities, Big Blue said. In the third quarter, IBM
is expected to introduce Actiance Vantage for IBM
Connections, which archives and logs social content to help enterprises remain
compliant with corporate and government regulations. Actiance software is used
by nine of the top 10 U.S.
banks and more than 1,600 organizations globally for the security, management
and compliance of unified communications, Web 2.0 and social media channels.
The new features within IBM Connections
also help foster greater participation in communities through moderation
allowing managers and editors of online content to review materials before they
are published, a critical step in compliance governance practices. To help
organizations take advantage of the social business opportunity, IBM
Connections also features social analytics to help users find experts and the
ability to comment or vote on ideas in a community. The Connections Ideation
Blog is designed to allow crowdsourcing of ideas across teams and customers.
"The benefits of social business are too great to ignore," said
Alistair Rennie, general manager of collaboration solutions at IBM,
in a statement. "With these new advancements around compliance enablement,
a social business can confidently activate networks of people to use a variety
of collaborative tools, to improve and accelerate innovation."
Meanwhile,
IBM also announced
that IDC ranked IBM number one in worldwide
market share for social platform software for 2009 and 2010. According to IDC,
the worldwide revenue for the social platforms software market was more than
$500 million in 2010, representing growth of 31.9 percent.
The adoption of social networking in the workplace is on the rise. According
to
IBM's 2011
CIO Survey, 55 percent of CIOs plan to invest in collaboration and social
networking to increase competitiveness over the next few years. In addition, 77
percent of CIOs are looking to change their internal collaboration processes
over the next three to five years.
Moreover, IBM said more than 35 percent
of Fortune 100 companies have adopted IBM's
social software offerings. In the past year, new IBM
Connections clients include
GMCH,
Bayer
MaterialScience,
CEMEX,
Sogeti,
Singapore
Airlines,
Australian
Bureau of Statistics,
Berlitz
International Inc.,
Sennheiser
electronic GmbH & Co. KG,
Panasonic
and
Rheinmetall
AG. IBM officials said IBM
Connections is available both on premise and in the cloud.
Email
Print
