The Heart of Business Tour Comes to Boston Next Week

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The Heart of Business is about … YOU! Join business leaders, IBM business partners, innovators, and thought leaders to connect and win. Learn how to use Social Business Solutions to accelerate innovation, improve collaboration, manage relationships, and deliver better metrics.

Enterprise social networks are becoming the heart of business productivity and engagement. Successful businesses today are using their enterprise software platforms to create an ecosystem of capabilities, which drive influential innovation, dynamic relationships, connected collaboration and integral outcomes.

Join us to learn, share, and socialize with IBM and our business partners, including HYPE, Kaltura, Hootsuite, panagenda, Riva CRM and TrustSphere. Creating valuable outcomes for your business. There will be a panel of Business Leaders and distinguished guests who will engage with the audience on ideas and success factors that can help one's business increase value in the new age of social technology and customer experience.

Next week, the #HeartofBusiness tour comes to Boston and I'm going to join the amazing list of speakers there. From there, it heads out to San Francisco and New York. Check out this video which describes what the event is all about:

If you are nearby, check out the agenda and register now.

See you there! 

The Results Are In: IBM Connections Benefits $26.5 million over 3 years !

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A recent commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of IBM titled The Total Economic Impact of IBM Connections analyzes the cost savings and business benefits of utilizing IBM Connections. The purpose of the study is to provide a framework to evaluate the potential financial impact of implementing the IBM Connections social collaboration platform within their organizations to improve internal processes to engage, empower, and inspire both employees and customers and unlock new opportunities.

To better understand the benefits, costs, and risks associated with an IBM Connections implementation, Forrester interviewed existing customers with multiple years of experience using both the IBM Connections cloud and on-premises collaboration platforms.

As one example, Forrester refers to a representative organization with about 35,000 employees and calculated benefits of about $26 million over a three year period. These come from increased productivity, reduced turnover, and reduced IT costs.

Here's an infographic with some of the highlights:

Here's a testimonial from one of our customers where Jacob Andersson, Corporate Systems Manager at Verisure, talks about his experience with IBM Connections.



You can download the study from here. To start a free trial of IBM Connections, go here: http://ibmcloud.com/social.

IBM Connections Files and Aspera: A Possible Integration

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Earlier this week I was asked what could be possible between Aspera, an IBM file transfer solution, and IBM Connections Files, IBM's offering for organizations looking for enterprise file sync and share (EFSS) capabilities.

First, let's clarify the differences between file transfer and file sharing and sync. In talking with some people in the Aspera organization, they told me to think of Aspera kind of like UPS.  UPS will take a package from point A to point B and they do not keep the package. Similarly, Aspera is all about getting files from point A to point B in the fastest way possible. In one example, they say that a 24GB file which could take ~26 hours via a traditional TCP/IP download, would only take 30 seconds using Aspera.



With that in mind, I came up with two ideas that you could do today with the Aspera APIs and the available extension points in IBM Connections

Transfer Existing Files

This idea is to create a new extension for Files as documented here. To do this, log in as the organization administrator and go to Admin - Organization Extensions. In there create a new extension as shown below:

And voilá. Once you code up the integration with your Aspera server this should get you a path to integrate. End users will now see this option when navigating to a file:

Upload and Transfer

The other thought is to create a new extension so that we intercept the file upload process. In this case, you navigate to the same Admin - Organization Extensions menu. In there, instead of creating a "File Menu" extension, you now create a "New File Menu" extension as shown below:

In any case, I strongly suggest you reach out to your partner or IBM services rep for further discussion.

I'm interested in your thoughts too. Any other use cases that come to mind ?