This is another in a series of my notes on Lotusphere 2012. I am very pleased to be back again after last year thanks to IBM’s support. These notes cover the Monday morning press Q&A with Mike Rhodin, IBM Senior Vice President, Software Solutions Group; Alistair Rennie, IBM General Manager, Social Business; and Jeff Schick.
Mike Rhodin began by putting the opening session in context. The underlying message in the opening demos was the seem-less integration behind what was seen in he demos to bring the components of your workday on the device you want. They have built this on an open standards platform. He added that they are just getting started. This is part of the journey toward higher value through software and services that IBM started ten years ago. They do not want to be in the consumer business but to help their clients achieve more success in this space and others.
Jeff Schick came up next. He talked about the power of the activity stream with the ability of others to write to it. The embedding of apps into the activity stream allows you to work in one space. The email integration is also in the same theme. By bringing into enterprise content management into social allows for ad hoc collaboration within work processes. The mobile capability extends all of this to the device that is getting increasing use. Analytics can support decision making at the point of need. The IBM Smart Cloud for Social Business involves a re-branding for consolidation of messaging.
Questions began. Does mobility affect business outcomes and are they using analytics for this question? Mike mentioned how they are gathering analytics on the evolution within eCommerce. They have added new statistics on mobile in ecommerce and whose products are most successful. The amount of mobile online shopping had increased significantly. Most data has focused on what is happening on the Web and not yet on use within the enterprise. Mike added that analytics is getting embedded in everything and the mobile is becoming the access point of choice. So there will be more work here.
Next question was on adoption issues. Alistair mentioned some of their new partnerships with service providers such as Dachis Group and institutions such as the one with San Jose State announced last week.
The next question was from two Chinese groups about security. How do you combine external and internal content in a secure way? Mike talked about their work with scalability and security with access control as they built their social networking platform for the enterprise. You can make things open or closed with a granularity of security.
Alistair talked about Notes Social edition. It will be easy to install. You do need both Connections ad Notes if you want the integration of the two but then can also work separately. It was asked if they will just consolidate on one platform. Mike explained that there is no mail server in Connections, it is integrated with Notes for this.
Alistair said that while you do not want to do business work with consumer Web tools such as YouTube, you will want to connect between business tools and consumer Web tools for particular tasks. IBM is focusing on making these connections fast and easy. I agree with both points.
Sentiment analysis was the next topic. Alistair said part of the challenge is to understand the right questions and who to ignore and who to pay attention to. A guy with 12 different mobile devices running at the same time asked about the next new thing and what will IBM support. Mike said it will take hard work to stay up and they have done 42 new releases in the past year.
Here is a complete listing of my notes from last year’s Lotusphere 2011.
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