IBM released today the IBM Connection Suite that combines the features and functions of:

• IBM Connections
• IBM Sametime Advanced
• IBM Sametime SUT Lite
• Lotus Quickr
• FileNet

There are some nice videos on the capabilities which really start to see some of the Project Northstar coming to fruition.

Now, there is nothing that you couldn’t do before but the vision here is clearly defined and you will likely see some pricing that will enable the enterprise to get this done faster and cheaper.  The only downside of this is the fact that there isn’t one deployment manager to make the package install easier.  They all sit on different WAS versions, data store versions vary by all the applications so from an install and administration standpoint it will be a heavy lifting process but those who have the vision, this is a great way to cohesively achieve a vision and fast ROI.

Yet another, ‘why didn’t I think of that’.  Actually, the other evening I did talk with a friend over dinner about something similar to Zaarly.com.  I am an addict of looking and sometimes buying stuff on Craigslist but it is certainly not too visually appealing.  Zaarly is a the fix.  As a test, I posted that I needed a part of my house painted, set a price and within MINUTES I had my first request.  The homepage is a mix of LivingSocial and Pinterest

And you can search for people looking or offering items on a map – super cool.

Then you get offers and can respond inline in the application – no more emails and the like from craigslist.

If you haven’t tried Zaarly out – I would highly suggest it.  Great option for offering and I will use it A LOT.

I presented on social business strategies today at IBM Impact 2012 in Las Vegas.  It was a packed room with great questions and collaboration.  Here is a copy of my presentation, as promised:

The New York Times had a nice article about the purchase of Instagram by Facebook for $1Billion.  Whether you think its worth it or not, it begs a bigger question – especially for the larger enterprise community.  Does that make mobile mainstream?  This purchase didn’t kickstart the mobile revolution but for a lot of IT and business leaders, this might have validated their working assumptions and budget bets for 2012/13.  The enterprise IT conversation will revolve around a few items which are clearly being validated by the marketplace:

• Mobile is no longer a long-pole bet – it is usually the impetus for portal/social upgrades
• Social business is in three very prominent places in the enterprise
• Kick starting internal social networks
• migrating mature communities to the external stakeholders
• the bleed of external social and internal social – you need a strategy
• Gamification or other adoption drivers are key to the short AND long term success of social communities
• Social portals are now the norm
• Location and presence will play a larger role with the dispersion of the modern workforce – enter true unified communications

You will see some or all of the above possibly start and live on mobile-only platforms like Instagram and Foursquare.  This is going to be a bigger bone to toss because companies are just starting to wrap their heads around the BYOD (bring your own device) concept or supporting multiple forms of employee/stakeholder mobile expectations.  Another move is the moving of the above onto private hosting environments.  This will make the big boys (IBM, MS, Oracle, etc) have to rethink their licensing models to deal with bursts and valleys of CPU’s.  All in all its the natural movement of IT.  Albeit, the movement is much, much faster than most people have come to get accustomed to in the past 4-6 years.  We are in a tech burst (sans bubble) and everyone is just trying to stay afloat.  This is just the beginning.

Analytics on social platforms has long plagued us.  You can get basic usage statistics like the below:

source: greenhouse.lotus.com

Not bad, but not a ton you can really do with that.  Most platforms, out of the box, have pretty poor analytics and that is becoming an issue for companies.  We are telling employees, customers, whoever to tag, rate, share, like and so on and really, there is no great way to make this look good without integrating a robust reporting platform that takes the data and dashboards it in a meaningful way.  Then here comes Google +, which everytime I log on I learn to love it a bit more and here is a where I really, really love it: Ripples.  First I want to take a second to thank Alan Lepofsky who has a great slideshare on social analytics to turning me on to this – so go add to the troves who downloaded the presentation – it rocks!.

Back to Rippples, when you are on Google+ you can click on any posts’ little arrow on the right and in the dropdown you click “View Ripples” and you get this:

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Today, TechCrunch reported that Pinterest, the pinning interest site has hit 11.7 MILLION unique monthly views – faster than any website in history.  The questions comes up is: How does this affect my enterprise?  Simple, if you aren’t looking at this or you have someone who says this is a fad and not enterprise worthy – they could be very wrong.  Obviously if are a retailer, you are missing the boat bigtime.  Pinterest drives more ecommerce decisions that Google now.  That is obvious.  But what if you are a healthcare organization?  Should this be of concern to you? Yes, and yes.

Healthcare is more than a passing add-on to ones life.  Health companies are realizing that they have to create personal relationships with their members.  What if you have a member who is having a baby and you have a great mom/dad to be blog or content site – wouldn’t you like to take advantage of the next Facebook to drive more traffic?  Yes, you would.  Same goes if you are financial services provider.

Bottom line, you have to follow the guiding light that you don’t have to be everywhere but you have to be where your stakeholders are and right now Pinterest is more than trending, its on fire.  Adding it to your site is 5 year old simple, just go here and insert it into your site.  Also here are some key articles on the value of Pinterest:

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This came from a friend and thought it humorous enough to post.  Enjoy and happy Monday!

Today IBM announced the intent to purchase, Worklight, an Israeli mobile platform company.  From their press release:

In a move that will help expand the enterprise mobile capabilities it offers to clients, IBM today announced a definitive agreement to acquire Worklight, a privately held Israeli-based provider of mobile software for smartphones and tablets. Financial terms were not disclosed.

With this acquisition, IBM’s mobile offerings will span mobile application development, integration, security and management. Worklight will become an important piece of IBM’s mobility strategy, offering clients an open platform that helps speed the delivery of existing and new mobile applications to multiple devices. It also helps enable secure connections between smartphone and tablet applications with enterprise IT systems.

IBM has worked hard and fast to help make mobile a better experience for both customers and end users.  Developer will like this because of the full development lifestyle – from server side, to services, to device.  How this will be threaded and valued among the likes of Mobile Portal Accelerator and mobile themes, are yet to be seen and I think IBM says it best for itself:

Worklight Builds on IBM’s Comprehensive Mobile Software and Services Offerings
Ubiquitous connectivity provides businesses with unique opportunities to better connect with their customer base, interact with external users and employees in more efficient ways, drive productivity and reach new audiences. IBM’s strategy is to offer its customers a complete set of the software and services they need to effectively bring mobile devices into their business infrastructure. These capabilities include:

• Build and Connect Mobile Applications:  The explosive growth of mobile has created a fragmented landscape for enterprises to support, often with limited budgets and skills.  IBM’s development and integration tools, complemented by Worklight, help clients to develop mobile applications and their supporting infrastructures for a variety of platforms just once – including Apple iOS and Google Android – while offering capabilities to securely connect to corporate IT systems.
• Manage and Secure Mobile Devices: As Bring Your Own Device or “BYOD” gains popularity, IT departments are looking to find an efficient and secure way to enable employees’ use of mobile devices in the work place. Rather than implement a separate infrastructure solely for mobile devices, IBM’s offerings are helping customers deliver a single solution that effectively manages and secures all endpoints.  These unified capabilities can now extend from servers and laptops, to smartphones and tablets.
• Extend Existing Capabilities and Capitalize on New Business Opportunities: The rapid adoption of mobile computing is also creating demand for organizations to extend their current business capabilities to mobile devices, while capitalizing on the new opportunities that mobile devices uniquely provide. For instance, IBM’s software, services and industry frameworks offer clients the ability to use mobile to engage with their customers around growing business opportunities such as analytics, commerce and social business applications.

Source: http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ibm-advances-mobile-capabilities-with-acquisition-of-worklight-138390024.html