ARMONK, N.Y., Feb. 1, 2016
/PRNewswire/ -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced continuing
momentum for its social business offerings with clients around the
world ushering in the next era of collaboration with IBM Verse and
Connections. IBM also announced expanded capabilities in its
collaboration portfolio with new innovations that make it easier
for clients to gain and share business insights across teams.
Social networks are fostering innovation by increasing
collaboration across the enterprise, with one IBM survey showing
that 64 percent of CIO respondents intend to invest in internal
collaboration, social networking and cloud through
20191. As more organizations deploy collaboration tools
such as Verse and Connections, businesses can gain greater
visibility into sentiment, activities and behaviors. By infusing
cognitive technology into these systems, IBM is helping clients
listen to, reason and learn from data in new ways.
For example, Lufthansa Group, the largest airline in
Europe, recently migrated from
Jive to IBM Connections to offer employees a more streamlined and
intelligent way to work together. IBM helped Lufthansa Group
migrate more than 120,000 users onto Connections in less than a
year, and since the migration, Lufthansa has been able to offer new
services to customers while improving collaboration, trust and
productivity within the organization.
"Previously, our collaboration capabilities often forced us to
think and work in the in-box – with one-directional communication
streams and knowledge that remains in the minds, on hard drives and
in e-mails", said Heike Griess-Nega,
Head of Collaboration Platforms, Corporate IT, Deutsche Lufthansa
AG. "IBM Connections is helping us now to break open these boxes
and to exchange ideas across borders and time zones."
IBM collaboration tools are also helping rural farmers in
East Africa by increasing
transparency into pricing and inventory. Working with IBM Business
Partner WebGate, TruTrade – a joint venture between African trading
businesses, Rural African Ventures Investments and Self Help Africa
– developed the myLLL platform on IBM Domino hosted on the IBM
Cloud.
The new IBM solution helps rural entrepreneurs communicate with
each other across geographically dispersed areas, workout business
deals, track mobile payments and the opportunity to increase
smallholder farmer incomes. As a result, smallholder farmers are
able to gain new insights into pricing and inventory in ways that
weren't possible before; facilitating collaboration, driving sales
and transforming life for smallholder farmers across the
region.
Flex Contact Center, a professional services and tele-sales
company, recently deployed IBM Connections Cloud to their internal
community known as Conectados, to reduce reliance on email,
eliminate the need for costly infrastructure investments, and give
employees faster access to client data. After realizing a 25
percent increase in employee productivity driven through
cloud-based collaboration, the company opted for a similar approach
to social business for email, and is now rolling out IBM Verse to
11,000 employees worldwide.
Calidad Pascual, a Madrid-based dairy company with more than
2,300 employees, deployed IBM Connections to gather input on
inventory management and immediately received more than 600
suggestions from employees offering ideas focused on improving
staff efficiency and cost reductions. The company also moved
competitor analysis and product development into Connections'
cross-collaboration communities, and in doing so, has been able to
gather new data on client projects that was not available before.
Using IBM Connections has allowed Calidad
Pascual to improve the collaboration and communication
between employees in different projects, simplify processes, reduce
time to market for new products and improve productivity.
"Few things are worse for a company's profitability than having
its staff's energy hindered by an outdated collaboration tool set,"
said Jeff Schick, General Manager
Enterprise Social Solutions, IBM Corporation. "Lufthansa, TruTrade,
Calidad Pascual and Flex Contact
Center have avoided this trap by recognizing the benefits of a
social business. With IBM social business tools, our clients are
able to harness the value of their employee's collective knowledge
and use it to innovate from within their enterprise."
IBM Expands Connections to Facilitate Global
Collaboration
With the nature of today's business
environment, where 70 percent of employees are engaged in social
activities both internally and externally1,
organizations are working differently. Social businesses are
increasingly capturing and analyzing knowledge from internal social
networks, and sharing it throughout the business to increase their
competitive advantage.
Today, IBM is adding new capabilities to Connections to help
more businesses turn social data into insights, to enable faster
and more informed decisions. The new enhancements will allow users
to:
- Customize communities by role or function: Specialized
communities for line-of-business users in marketing, HR, sales and
other departments – matched with new page layouts, movable widgets,
and the addition of rich content – help organizations streamline
collaboration.
- Manage files easier: Personal sub-folders now available
on Connections let users preview files prior to downloading and
more easily migrate information from Connections to their
desktop
- Remain productive on the go: New enhancements
extend polls and surveys to mobile devices and allow users to
securely edit documents, presentations and spreadsheets from their
preferred Android or iOS device. Additionally, administrators have
enhanced controls which allow them to secure the app with an
application level password rather than using other
credentials.
For information about IBM's social business initiatives, please
visit http://www.ibm.com/social-business/us-en/ or follow
#IBMSocialBiz and #IBMConnect on Twitter.
1 IBM "Raising the game: The IBM Business Tech Trends Report."
August 2014
Media Contact:
Nick Smith
IBM External Relations
nssmith@us.ibm.com
978 869 0870
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SOURCE IBM