IBM targeting Social Media software for business as a key growth area in 2013

Our performance in the fourth quarter and for the full year was driven by our strategic growth initiatives -- growth markets, analytics, cloud computing, Smarter Planet solutions -- which support our continued shift to higher-value businesses," said Ginni Rometty, IBM chairman, president and chief executive officer. Ms. Rometty also highlighted IBM is focusing on new growth areas such as mobile technology, social media software for businesses and security technology. Mike Rhodin, senior vice president of the IBM Software Solutions Group, has said that businesses are adopting social media technologies and collaboration tools have become mandatory for employees to communicate and collaborate in the organizations. Employees in the business organizations are expecting to have such social media based collaboration tools within the organization’s intranets. To further prove the significance of social business technologies, IBM referred to a 2011 Forrester study during the IBM Connect Conference which highlighted social business as an "emerging business category," and social technologies are expected to be worth $6.4 billion by 2016.

IBM has renamed its Lotusphere, an annual conference hosted by Lotus Software (one of IBM's five software brands) as IBM Connect in January 2013 and during this event it highlighted its social business strategy with the debut of several new software and cloud services products. The intentions of these new services are to enable businesses to integrate IBM's social networking and analytics technologies with critical business processes. The new IBM Connections social networking platform software is intended to enable users to analyze big data from inside and outside an organization, including Facebook, Twitter, audio and video, embedded document management capabilities allow members of a network to access, analyze and act on different data types relevant to their work for improving decision-making and business results and will be available from march 2013. Another feature is enhanced integration of social capabilities in the Microsoft Outlook client that will allow users to access their social data (such as profiles, files and communities) directly in Microsoft Outlook. In December 2012, IBM released IBM docs to include social document editing on-premises and in the cloud as part of the IBM SmartCloud for Social Business that allows browser users to simultaneously collaborate on word processing, spreadsheet and presentation documents.

IBM acquired Kenexa in December 2012, merged its Applicant Tracking System for talent data insights and launched a new web-based social networking environment in the form of the IBM Employee Experience Suite which is targeted at HR managers to "attract, empower and motivate talent" as the firm puts it and features social networking, e-meeting and instant messaging capabilities. IBM also announced that it expects to ship IBM Notes and Domino Social Edition 9 in March 2013 and expected to be a truly social email client" that delivers a social experience to users. Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the Workplace highlights IBM as a Leader in Social business technology market and IBM is investing heavily on the social technologies for future growth.