IBM brings the power of analytics to social business

IBM recently unveiled new software and services that deliver 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 also announced 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.

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.

Powered by analytics, IBM Connections delivers capabilities including wikis, blogs, activities, to help organizations collaborate on the fly. IBM Connections includes the ability to access enterprise email, calendar and business tasks from inside the Connections platform.

Additionally, IBM introduced Connections Enterprise Content Edition, an integrated social content management solution that combines the scalability of social networking with enterprise content management and enhanced compliance and control features sought by users in regulated industries. Designed to manage the entire life cycle of office documents, Web and social content, IBM Connections Enterprise Content Edition increases the ability to share knowledge, gain expertise and create high-value content quickly through advanced content, document management and workflow use cases.

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*Source: Social Enterprise Apps Redefine Collaboration," Forrester Research, Inc., November 30, 2011.