IBM ConnectED 2015 Keynote Recap - the IBM Connections Demo

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It's hard to believe that just a week ago was the keynote (aka OGS ... aka the Opening General Session) at IBM ConnectED .  This year I again had the opportunity to demo during the keynote and present IBM Connections Next, the next iteration of our market leading enterprise social collaboration platform.

Prior to the demos, some interesting stats were shared. The one that caught my attention the most is that the IBM Verse announcement gathered more impressions than any other IBM announcement, including Watson, the IBM + Apple partnership and the IBM + Twitter partnership. That's HUGE!

The onto the demos. This year, Scott Souder focused on IBM Verse and I focused exclusively on IBM Connections. I wanted the audience to take a way a few things: 1) our focus on design, 2) our focus on helping people understand what's important so you can work on what matters, and 3) our focus on reducing interruptions.

(photo credit: Ed Brill)

Updated 11/Feb/2015: Here's a recording of the OGS (and you can skip to 37:30 for the IBM Connections demo):



For another perspective, one of the attendees in the first row captured the keynote and made it available in YouTube. Enjoy the keynote here (and you can skip to 54:00 for the IBM Connections demo):



And here's a sampling of the tweets during the OGS:

Beyond IBM Connections Next, there was also an announcement for a new IBM Connections offering that's just for Files. This will be the lead offering to compete in the Enterprise File Sync and Share space.  This is in response to many users loving our file sync capabilities, and in some cases asking for just that (without the other collaboration aspects from Connections such as Communities, Wikis, Blogs, etc). Analysts have also already highly rated IBM as a leader in the Enterprise File Sync and Share space.

This new offering will give you Files only, along with expertise search, social analytics and access to our desktop and mobile apps.  Users will have the option to buy upgrade to other cloud offerings such as Chat, IBM Verse, Web Meetings, IBM Docs, etc. The offering will be available as part of our March 2015 deployment.

Additionally, customers looking for compliance will be able to start using the Actiance Vantage offering with IBM Connections Cloud soon.

From the OGS, I headed over to the Dolphin for the What's New and Coming in IBM Connections and IBM Connections Mobile.  I'll cover that in the next post.