IBM Lotusphere: Analytics to drive social business from the cloud

426,000 employees can't be wrong?

IBM said it had been developing its social business strategy as far back as a quarter of a century now. Indeed, with over 426,000 employees across 170 countries, the company has nurtured a long product line in collaboration tools from Lotus Notes right through to its current cloud-based web 2.0-driven social software package, IBM Connections. The product itself is designed to provide data monitoring and intelligence processing carried out in IBM's SmartCloud service.

The better' business decisions IBM is proposing we can now benefit from will be based around data analytics. It will relate to users creating data from devices and sensors' to produce a mix of both structured and unstructured data i.e. from simple yes/no data with a numerical value, to harder to classify and analyse video and/or voice data.

According to Forrester Research, the market opportunity for social enterprise apps is expected to grow at a rate of 61 per cent year-on-year, reaching $6.4 billion by 2016, compared with its $600 million value today. IBM argued that, despite organisations' willingness to embrace social capabilities to transform business operations, they lack the tools to gain the insight held within.

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