« Social business » has been around for a while in IBM events and presentations. Big Blue has even nominated Sandy Carter, who previously led the marketing around SOA, as a “socbiz” evangelist. And if you follow her on Twitter, you can see how serious she is about being social! But when it comes to the products, social business did not really translate into solutions until now.
Last year in Orlando, during Lotusphere, the annual Lotus event, we could see previews of what socbiz would translate into. I came back this year, hoping we could see actual products in action… and here they are. At least, most of them, even if some tools are still in beta version.
What’s important is that IBM built the Social business products with new ways of working and creating value in mind. It’s not just adding “social” tools on top an old collaborative environment. What I see here is really about doing business in a smarter way (to paraphrase IBM slogan!). It means leveraging collective intelligence throughout organizations, but also engage with partners and customers, analyze social media feeds, and empower every user within a company by giving him the right information in the right context.
Of course, technology matters. This vision needs Big Data platform, analytics tools, standards and connectors, portals, directories, security, mobility, cloud… all of that in the IBM portfolio, what a surprise! But again, Social business is not just hype to sell more products; it is becoming a reality in most vendors’ strategies (because big early adopters already endorsed it). SAP embraced this vision and is implementing social tools, Microsoft is all about empowering users and business communities, Salesforce.com wants to be seen no more as a CRM vendor, but as a Social Enterprise… And as far as Oracle is concerned, my prediction is that you can expect an acquisition in that space in the next 18 months. By chance, there are plenty of “Social something software and solutions” out there on the market… In fact, whether companies want it or not, social software will become mainstream. But in order to get the users to leverage these tools, and to use them in a smart way, the tools will have to be integrated, or federated at least. That’s the purpose of the “activity stream” concept, which captures all the events and feeds relevant for the user.
IBM has got the potential and the adequate tools to be the federated front-end of all the social software companies will implement. But right now, the biggest advantage IBM has in this space – the experience around collaboration and communication IBM has cumulated with Lotus development – is also its biggest disadvantage. In the eyes of non-IBM shops, Lotus is associated with email, Notes and Domino applications: the old-fashioned way to build applications and to communicate, no matter the efforts of modernization have been made in the last decade. Against younger and/or more aggressive players, it could be hard for Big Blue to be the vendor of choice for social business.