We are about 4 weeks away for IBM Connect 2013 to kick off!
#IBMConnect promises the conference to be at if you are in the midst of becoming a social business or have already become a social business and want to share your story.
I'm especially looking forward at the large amount of customer sessions that are scheduled during the conference. I personally find that customer sessions are the best since it gives everyone the opportunity to learn from each other. As I mentioned last week, I'll be presenting the roadmap for all things IBM Connections at the conference. Certainly, a can't miss session .
Also last week, Alistair Rennie also posted a video where he shares what he's looking forward to at the IBM Connect conference.f
Here's a preview of the technical content you will find at the conference from IBMers and partners.
A successful social selling strategy takes advantage of converged collaboration, dynamic content, and analytics. IBM now offers an open standards-based, security-rich platform for social business that combines these capabilities.
The solution, built on IBM Connections, can help your sales organization to reach people, engage them, discover new insights, and act swiftly to capture value.
Until now, CRM and sales force automation solutions have focused on managers managing employees and data with little attention to selling. The solution provides sales teams with tools that enable them to focus on selling by combining traditional CRM with analytics and collaboration.
Socially enabling your sales processes helps you create a sales team that:
Spends more time selling
Can easily tap the wisdom of top sellers and experts.
Understands your customers better than the competition.
Only focuses on critical data and deals.
Check out this demo of Social CRM powered by IBM Connections:
To learn more, make sure you attend the Social CRM sessions at IBM Connect !
We are less than 6 weeks away to start IBM Connect 2013, the premier social business conference. Earlier this morning I completed the registration process. My level of excitement is extremely high!!!! I can't wait to start 2013.
For the first time I'll get the opportunity to present the roadmap for IBM Connections and talk about what we are delivering on-premises and on the cloud. If you are interested in learning and seeing what's coming in the world wide market leading social business platform, you can NOT miss this session. I'll also be covering updates to our IBM Connections SDK which we announced last week.
This week I'm in Boston working with the IBM Connections developers. This is my last trip until I see them again at IBM Connect. This week, it's all about creating the content for the big unveil at IBM Connect. If you want to stay up-to-date with what's happening a #ibmconnect stay tuned to our Social Media Aggregator:
If you haven't registered for IBM Connect 2013, what are you waiting for? Register today!
Today, IBM announced the availability of IBM Connections on PureSystems. PureSystems allow Ability to maintain and update through a single console with zero downtime. The same capability was released for WebSphere Portal earlier in the year (to learn more click here ).
A social business recognizes that people do business with people and optimizes how people interact to accomplish organizational goals. IBM Connections empowers people to easily connect with employees, partners, and customers, helping businesses, government agencies, educational institutions, to optimize collaboration. The new IBM Connections pattern for use with PureSystems allow organizations to focus critical resources on value add activities by significantly reducing installation and configuration times.
If you are not familiar with PureSystems, check out this video to learn more:
WebSphere Portal has also been available for PureSystem since earlier this year. In this demo you can see how easy and fast it is to deploy Portal and now you have the same capability for IBM Connections:
Using IBM Connections Hypervisor Edition 4 can help enable better utilization of hardware and faster response to demands for newly deployed systems. This can help to reduce both hardware and software operation costs, and maintenance costs. By deploying virtual images, businesses can also leverage a known, stable, and tested configuration, which can help reduce the potential for errors and reduce time to deployment of a working system, whether for development, test, or production. By making the deployment easier, organizations can focus their investment on social business adoption.
Today, IBM has released the 2012 Tech Trends Report covering mobile, cloud, social and analytics. The 2012 Tech Trends Report is based on a survey of more than 1,200 professionals who make technology decisions for their organizations (22 percent IT managers, 53 percent IT practitioners and 25 percent business professionals). Our respondents come from 16 different industries and 13 countries, spanning both mature and growth markets.1 To better understand how technology trends are impacting future IT professionals, we also surveyed more than 250 academics and 450 students across these same countries.
Something that stands out from the report is a skill gap that may threaten progress by businesses to adopt these technology shifts. And the report doesn't just highlight these skill gaps, it actually gives concrete recommendations for business and IT leaders as well as for IT practitioners.
I also found interesting the rate of adoption. Globally, only 34% of companies have adopted Social Business. And as you can see from the Infographic below countries like Brazil , South African and Spain stand out since almost more than half of the companies have adopted social business, demonstrating a huge opportunity still worldwide.
Check out the info graphic below (hover over the different elements to learn more):
As part of the report, IBM has developed a set of videos that feature technology experts by topic area (analytics, cloud, mobile, social, security) offering their opinions on the skills gap, what types of skills students and professionals need, as well as prescriptive advice on how people can get skills in these specific technology areas. In this video, Doug Heintzman describes what people should think about when developing social business skills.
The video the other videos playlist is here. To download the report, click here.
IBM Docs was deployed to the IBM SmartCloud this weekend. As you probably know, IBM Docs has been available now for about a year in Beta. As you can imagine, it's very exciting to finally take this out of beta and make it available to our customers.
So, on Saturday night, we updated our SmartCloud data centers around the world to deploy IBM Docs as well as added more capabilities to IBM Connections on the cloud. IBM SmartCloud Docs is simple yet powerful - you can get started quickly, but still have the advanced features that you need. Start new online documents, or view or edit Microsoft™ Office and IBM® Symphony™ files already stored in Files. IBM Docs lets you simultaneously edit a document with other contributors, greatly improving the simplicity and efficiency by which teams build documents.
Choose to work independently or co-edit with others in real time, seeing changes in the color that is assigned to each editor.
Leave a comment or reply to one in the context of the document
Publish and manage versions of the document in Files
View the contents of published documents online - no need to download
Download documents as Microsoft Office or .PDF format as needed
IBM Docs customers can easily create professional looking documents and share them with others. IBM SmartCloud Docs is available at no extra cost for SmartCloud Engage Advanced subscribers, and is available as an add-on for SmartCloud Engage and SmartCloud Connections subscribers. Check out the demo below: Finally, IBM SmartCloud Connections subscribers now have the ability to use the new Ideation, Blogs, and Wikis capability in their communities for enhanced team collaboration.
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