Corporate Performance Management

Corporate Performance Management

Share
February 07, 2011

IBM Utilizes Lotusphere Theme To Focus On Social Media



IBM has recently announced the launch of Lotusphere’s biggest annual theme. The annual IBM Lotusphere customer and partner event, which was held at Orlando recently, was focussed on the agenda as to how to make the best use of social media and collaboration tools in business, as well as launch of several new products by IBM (News - Alert). A recent study by IBM has revealed that the worldwide market for social platforms is expected to rise by 33 percent, that is $630 million by 2011 and then triple in size to $1.86 billion by 2014.

IBM has strategic plans in place that will bring its social software portfolio to the most successful mobile devices on the market, including RIM's BlackBerry (News - Alert) and Playbook, the iPad, iPhone and Android devices. Also, IBM will focus on the cloud based technology by launching a new version of LotusLive Symphony, which is a productivity suite that aims to give companies a social platform to simultaneously collaborate on documents in the cloud. The LotusLive Symphony suite provides access to documents irrespective of the company’s firewall and the user’s location. Also, the administrator or the author of the documents will be able to work either privately work on documents, or co-edit them with other people in real time. IBM anticipates this service to become available in the latter half of 2011.

The launch of new products on the Lotusphere platform will further enable development of new collaborative products as well as help partners get involved in social business. The key programmes that will be made available to more than 900 of IBM's partners and outlined at Lotusphere includes, Social Business Authorisation which will provide business partners an increased margin of up to 15 percent on sales while demonstrating their strong social business skills; Industry Authorisation is similar to the Social Business Authorization, however this will provide business partners with access to industry-focused resources and incentives to help their clients become social businesses; New Sales Tools by IBM will provide assessment training and tools to help business partners to express the value of social software; New Education includes Training courses will be provided free of charge to help develop and integrate social business solutions for partner's clients; and Computing offers insight for IT leaders.

In a release, Henry Dewing, principal analyst at Forrester Research (News - Alert), said that, "Lotus Traveler and other native apps on mobile devices are a key strategy to drive the adoption of IBM collaboration solutions. Mobility is a key and growing characteristic of the information worker market, and IBM is committed to ensuring that mobile information workers are not treated like second-class citizens when accessing corporate applications and data."



Carolyn John is a Contributor to TMCnet. To read more of her articles, please columnist page.

Edited by Jennifer Russell
Share


blog comments powered by Disqus


FREE eNewsletter

Financial Technology Industry News