I spent two days at IBM's Information On
Demand (iod2009) conference in Las Vegas last week and very quite impressed by
a number of things. Among them:
- IBM’s Smart Archiving initiative that
brings together a variety of technologies from various groups around IBM to
offer a very comprehensive approach to content archiving.
- The focus on content analytics across a
wide range of areas. In the context of
archiving, for example, IBM's Content Analyzer can scan file servers and other
data sources for information and provide deep analytics to determine what needs
to be archived as a precursor to the archiving process itself. An important feature of this is the ability
to analyze content from a variety of structured and unstructured information
types to find patterns, anomalies, etc. in the data.
- IBM’s significant commitment to cloud
computing across virtually every area in the company.
- Some interesting approaches that are
being taken to expanding the uptake of LotusLive, as well as some new
capabilities that will be introduced in LotusLive in 2010.
- IBM is getting good traction in the
collaborative space using Lotus Connections with some very large organizations,
including a 35,000-seat deployment that went into production last week.
As in the Web conferencing space, IBM is
clearly one of the leaders in the use of social networking tools. For example:
- At present, 410,000 IBMer profiles and
an additional 75,000 contractors are available via Lotus Connections.
- There is an average of six million lookups
each day in the system, or roughly 12 per profile each day.
- IBM's internal microblogging capability
went from 0 to 150,000 users in the first 10 weeks after its introduction.
- There are currently 5,600 social
communities across IBM representing various products, sciences and other
groups.
- Every IBMer profile contains his or her
social networking posts, enabling access to a growing variety of information on
expertise, travel plans and other content.
- Clearly, IBM is getting some
significant traction with its offerings externally, and is also making good use
of the technology internally.
- IBM has published an interesting way of
measuring the value of social networking that I am looking forward to reading.
Another good sign for IBM, and for the
economy as a whole, is the fact that the conference was quite crowded – at
least as crowded as last year’s.
OR
Commentary for Messaging Wire
Week of November 3, 2009