astro posted on January 24, 2012 08:16
Wow – Florida sure is nice in the winter. I didn’t want to come home and Seattle snows delayed my trip by three days. So here’s the net-net-net on IBM’s Lotusphere conference focused on Social Business. The end of the story? I’ll be back next year – it’s a must-do!
1. Partners See Opportunity – Minimal Channel Conflict. Mike Ostrowski (pictured right), vice president at Ascendant Technology, is the closet “thing” I found at Lotusphere to an MSP/SMB Nation channel partner. He’s on the “other side” from our traditional Microsoft crowd, working for a large consulting practice that is IBM-centric. His firm is nationwide with a focus on technology services and digital services (the latter being like an agency with soft skills and design and planning). His firm has 40 percent of its customers in the SMB space with the balance in enterprise. Focus areas include: health care, financial services, insurance and retail. His firm is embracing IBM’s Social Cloud initiative and he likened his consulting business model to a ladder. The technology consulting team that Ostrowski oversees is good at scaling up the ladder; the digital services team makes sure the ladder is attached to the right wall. Finally – he shared that IBM does a great job of managing the channel conflict. IBM bids directly on work – something Microsoft doesn’t really do yet in its partner program.
2. The “Strategy Guy” Speaks. Doug Heintzman (pictured right), Director of Strategy for IBM Lotus, shared his three-legged social business stool with me in a private interview. Basically a -> b -> c in that order. “Last week I was talking with the CIO at mid-west manufacturer. I explained to him that any time people get together, human beings have figured out ways to leverage what they are doing. Today that is social business.”
a. Collaboration and Discover. Raw collaboration has value – people talk, share and find each other. Productivity increases, can move around. People get that collaboration is a good idea. Hard to measure. The social business augmentation – allows you to discover patterns, etc.
b. Insight. Driven by analytics. What have you done since people are behaving in this new way? Creating semantic descriptions of this discrete data? Creating linkages? You can start measuring stuff. Example: IBM CIO office measurement wiki. Sentiment analysis. This is a way to monitor sentiment on an issue. Maybe setup a mentoring relationship between two people.
c. Transformation. Driven by process integration. High-levels of engagement. How much progress is management making on what they promised (engaged, emotional corporate culture)? Key is a social business process that promotes ENGAGEMENT!
3. Matchmaking – Customers Interlope with Partners. Kenneth LaVan is a lawyer with a mission. As an IBM customer, he has built his law practice around IBM solutions. The current solution set is based on the Social Cloud paradigm and he’s teamed with an IBM partner to commercialize it. Started in 2004, LaVan Neidenberg is a law firm focused on veteran’s disability and social security disability claims. It has 40 employees and 5,000 clients. Two years ago it started developing the software with Group Business Software. GBS, a premier IBM partner out of Boston-area and business partner, teamed with law firm to streamline its business. Problem was ten different apps (doc management, e-mail, etc.) were being used in this law firm. Enter its solution – the social business app called EasyClaim. It will be commercialized and is currently being tested on Group Live platform. Vertically, it will be geared towards the legal market. The release timeline is to be determined. LaVan is featured in the video above.
4. SmartCloud Mobility – Beginning of an ERA! Rob Ingram, Sr. Manager for Mobile Communications at IBM Lotus shared his view of the world the mobile strategy is three-fold: (1) Collaboration for end user products, (2) Mobile web apps and portal apps and (3) Security – mobile security. “The goal is to round out and create lots of mobile apps on the collaboration side. At Lotusphere, the latest is that new versions of these apps have been announced. This includes new version of Connections and Domino apps that transform into mobile apps.” Ingram reaffirmed IBM’s long-stand support for BlackBerry and support for iOS and Android. “It’s the beginning of the era for mobile.”
5. Send the Elevator back Down! In a prior blog entry,I spoke about the college students attending the first day of Lotusphere. It was impressive. On the last day of Lotusphere, I spoke with the architects behind this youth movement, John Durst (Chief Marketing Officer) and Michael Baum (Corporate Communications) for GBS, a large IBM partner. These two shared that GBS CEO Jorg Ott, issued a challenge two years ago at Lotusphere to engage “new blood” in the technology industry. Calling it “send the elevator back down” Jorg called for 500 college students to attend Lotusphere 2011. He met that goal with 500+ students coming from 12+ Florida Universities. His "youth movement” is especially timely given IBM’s shift to social business, which attracts the younger social media crowd. At Lotusphere, the second year for the college program, there were 800+ students from 13+ universities who attended day one, wearing the same t-shirts and receiving a cool backpack. “We also had a job fair with 20+ organizations in a side room.” Durst shared. “We had a Twitter contest too.” Baum added. “Everytime a student tweeted; she was entered into a contest to win either an Amazon Kindle or a dinner with Jorg. There were so many tweets at one point that Lotusphere was a trending topic worldwide on Twitter!” The GSB team is shown below (CEO Jorg Ott second from left).
Long-time readers will recognize that we at SMB Nation are engaged in a youth movement recruit to supplement all of us “gray hairs and no hairs” in the SMB MSP channel. Stay tuned. Youth ahead!