IBM Lotusphere: Analytics to drive social business from the cloud

IBM's Lotusphere conference kicked off this week in Orlando with an inspirational keynote delivered by Hollywood actor Michael J Fox.

Speaking with great humour and composure, Fox urged the audience "not to play the result" as he put it by not accepting an assumed future in work or life in general. In an auditorium hall packed with geeks, Fox also referenced his Back To The Future' legacy, saying even he didn't know whether hoverboards were likely to arrive anytime soon.

But we couldn't reminisce about 80's movies forever and the IBM conference content was opened by Alistair Rennie, Big Blue's general manager of collaboration solutions. Rennie explained IBM's concept of social business as the meeting point between social media tools and culture when applied to business processes, roles and outcomes.

"Business processes led by people are about to change and this will result in deep and pervasive analytics in order for businesses to gain value at the right point, in real time," he said.

"This level of analytics will move to become a service, so then this is an important consideration for forward-looking software application developers looking to know what their future roadmaps are likely to feature."