I.B.M.The latest version of I.B.M.’s Connections software lets users on tablet devices view profile information for people in their networks.For corporate managers, I.B.M. is a security blanket. Over the years, Big Blue’s endorsement and embrace of a new technology product or trend have been the signal that it is safe for the business mainstream, from the personal computer to Linux.
I.B.M. is benefiting from its seal-of-approval status as it seeks to build a big business in selling Web-based social networking, collaboration and decision-support software to corporations. The unit selling social business software, Connections, was founded in 2007, and it has tens of thousands of customers, I.B.M. says. About 5,000 people, mostly customers and partners, are expected to attend the company’s Connect 2012 conference in Orlando, Fla., on Monday and Tuesday.
The enthusiasm for adopting social media tools is another sign of consumer-led innovation in technology. The business world is taking a page from the social-media leaders like Facebook and Twitter — after the tools have been tamed a bit for corporate use. The potential for these tools to speed up communication and decision-making within corporations has been evident for years. The term Enterprise 2.0 was coined in 2006 by Andrew McAfee, then at the Harvard Business School and now a principal research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Digital Business.
But I.B.M., analysts say, is going well beyond a refashioning of consumer features with the latest version of its Connections social business software, with beta code being released this week. The company, they note, is increasingly folding its information discovery, or analytics, technology into its social business software.
I.B.M.I.B.M.’s Connections software allows access to internal and external networks from one location.The technology is both homegrown, from its research labs, and acquired. Since 2005, I.B.M. has spent more than $14 billion on 25 companies that specialize in data mining and analytics.
“It’s what the analytics side of I.B.M. is doing with social media that is new and compelling,” said Stephen O’Grady, a founder of RedMonk, a research firm.
Many corporate technology companies, Mr. O’Grady noted, have social media or analytics products, including Microsoft, Oracle, EMC, Salesforce and Adobe. But I.B.M., he said, has the early lead in marrying the two, social media tools and analytics.
The intelligence being built into the software can be applied inside a company or out in the marketplace, said Alistair Rennie, general manager of social business software at I.B.M.
For an individual worker, the new software can help find and recommend experts within the company to solve, say, a specific marketing or manufacturing problem. The Web-based software, Mr. Rennie said, can sift through a worker’s online messages, comments on company blogs and wikis, and shared documents to determine what is most important to the person — and present that first on an on-screen dashboard.
“The more you use it, the system itself becomes smarter,” Mr. Rennie said. “It becomes a background service that helps you prioritize work.”
More advanced features, he said, can cull through public posts on Twitter and Facebook to analyze trends in how people view the company and its products.
At TD Bank, a large North American bank based in Toronto, the new software has been available to workers in Canada for about a month. (The bank plans to make the software available to its 40,000 employees in the United States this week.) In Canada, it has already proved quite popular, attracting 43,000 unique users, said Wendy Arnott, the bank’s vice president for social media and digital communication.
Thousands of blogs and wikis have been created by the workers themselves, including a group of small-business advisers sharing best practices and spreadsheet users sharing software and tips. Online project-management groups, Ms. Arnott said, are already finding they need fewer meetings.
So far, the intelligent features have been used internally, for things like finding and communicating with subject experts across the bank. “Data that is shared becomes searchable and findable in a way that could not be done before,” Ms. Arnott said. “There is a lot of power in that.”