IBM to ease social business adoption with new platform

CEBU, Philippines - IBM Philippines has announced its newest platform helping industry players simplify and accelerate social business adoption and providing employees with a single access point to all of their collaboration tools, social media, email, group activities blogs and others.

Available through a wide choice of deployment, IBM Notes and Domino Social 9, gives front line business employees across marketing, development, human resource, etc. a single access point for all of their social collaboration tools.

"There is a huge potential for social business boom in the Philippines, which is already considered as the social media capital of the world,” said Aileen Rodriguez, country manager of Software Group.

According to an IBM study, 82 percent of chief marketing officers (CMO) plan to increase their use of social media over the next three to five years.

IBM's 2012 CEO identified the same trend—while today only 16 percent of CEOs are using social business platforms to connect with customers, that number is poised to spike to 57 percent within the next three to five years.

As social adoption grows, organizations are believed to use these technologies to transform their culture and drive innovation globally. Email is a critical component of this evolution.

According to Osterman Research, each day, 116 billion emails are sent and received by an estimated 800 million workers.

When compared to Facebook and Twitter, which have reported 2.5 billion shares and 400 million tweets a day, respectively, it is clear that email remains the dominant communication application in the workplace.

However, in this social business age, email can no longer exist on an island, the study revealed. 

Named the Enterprise Social Software leader by the International Data Corporation for three consecutive years, IBM today extends its social business leadership by bringing messaging into the social experience, turning email from a client application used only for mail to a core component of a platform that drives knowledge sharing, workforce productivity and overall business value. 

Through a single interface, an employee who is working on a new marketing project can check email as well as activity streams containing the latest work from each team member, share files with colleagues, view new blogs on topics relevant to the subject and more.

In addition, since the service includes the industry’s broadest device platform support, each team member has access to the same content all through their mobile device of choice, whether it’s an iPhone, Android device, Windows Phone or the new BlackBerry 10. 

As for those companies using Microsoft Outlook, IBM also provides a new social connector for Outlook and integration with Microsoft Exchange.

Through this connector IBM is able to bring the capabilities of shared files, communities and other key social capabilities directly into the Outlook client to ensure social email can be a reality for virtually any business.

"Today, more than 50 percent of the Fortune 500 have licensed IBM’s social software.  IBM can help transform organizations into social businesses that allow for better client understanding and engagements,” said Rodriguez.

IBM Notes and Domino are available on premises as well as through IBM SmartCloud where customers such as Brunswick Corporation are using it to provide their 8,000 users with cloud-based feature-rich email. 

IBM social business platform features a complete set of capabilities including enterprise-grade social networking, social analytics, and social content management in a seamless, unified experience across a myriad of business applications. — (FREEMAN)