IBM today announced it is extending its social business platform with its first fully integrated social mail solution. The move aims to simplify and accelerate social business adoption in the marketplace, providing employees with a single access point to all of their collaboration tools social media, email, group activities, blogs and more.
Available through a wide choice of deployment options including on premises, in the IBM SmartCloud, hybrid or on mobile devices, IBM Notes and Domino Social Edition 9 now gives front line business employees across marketing, development, human resource and more a single access point for all of their social collaboration tools. As a result they are able to improve workforce productivity and speed innovation.
Last month, IBM announced new social software offerings designed to help companies gain deeper insights into big data generated through the use of social networks.
According to an IBM study, 82 percent of CMOs plan to increase their use of social media over the next three to five years. IBM's 2012 CEO Study identified the same trend - while today only 16 percent of CEOs are using social business platforms to connect with customers, that number is poised to spike to 57 percent within the next three to five years.
As social adoption grows, organizations must use these technologies to transform their culture and drive innovation globally. Email is a critical component of this evolution. According to Osterman Research, each day 116 billion emails are sent and received by an estimated 800 million workers. When compared to Facebook and Twitter, which have reported 2.5 billion items shared and 400 million tweets a day respectively, it is clear that email remains the dominant communication application in the workplace. However, in this social business age, email can no longer exist on an island.
For example, through a single interface an employee who is working on a new marketing project can check email as well as activity streams containing the latest work from each team member, share files with colleagues, view new blogs on topics relevant to the subject and more. In addition, since the service includes the industry’s most broad device platform support, each team member has access to the same content all through their mobile device of choice, whether it’s an iPhone, Android device, Windows Phone or the new BlackBerry 10, introduced today in the United States.
As for those companies using Microsoft Outlook, IBM also provides a new social connector for Outlook and integration with Microsoft Exchange. Through this connector IBM is able to bring the capabilities of shared files, communities and other key social capabilities directly into the Outlook client to ensure social email can be a reality for virtually any business.
IBM Notes and Domino are available on premises as well as through IBM SmartCloud where customers such as Brunswick Corporation are using it to provide their 8,000 users with cloud-based feature-rich email.
Last month, IBM announced new social software offerings will help companies gain deeper insights into big data generated through the use of social networks.
