Big Blue is huge on the cloud and this week invited customers to join it in its burgeoning cloud social circle.
Its new offerings – IBM SmartCloud Connections and IBM SmartCloud for Social Business – seem particularly suited for BYOD scenarios. One set of features lets workers share and sync files over the cloud.
Going with a vendor such as IBM for this is far more secure and trustworthy than letting employees willy nilly set up DropBox and GoogleDocs accounts.
SafeGuard is already on board with the new service. “The one-two social and cloud combination has not only delivered an increase in productivity with our own workforce, but our clients are also reaping the benefits,” said Pamela Webb, SVP of Business Services, SafeGuard World International. “The ability to actively engage and have real-time visibility to project progress in a secure environment really gives our clients confidence in both the implementation process and our organization.”
IBM SmartCloud Connections now has social bridging and other community features. “Social bridging presents a single view of social content from related communities, whether inside or outside the organizations. Now, for example, an internal marketing community will have access to valuable discussions and content being shared by partners and customers in other communities, all presented in a single unified view. IBM SmartCloud also offers the industry’s only guest model which lets employees easily extend collaboration to partners, clients and any others outside the business,” IBM argued.
And squaring up against GoogleDocs is IBM SmartCloud Docs which lets workers collaborate on spreadsheets, presentations and documents.
SmartCloud Docs “delivers the industry’s most social set of Web editing tools that include social commenting, discussions, author presence and revision management, all available through the cloud on browsers and mobile devices such as the iPad,” IBM said.
Finally, IBM SmartCloud Notes brings social capabilities to your e-mail client, including file sharing and communities.
Another IBM customer, Sika AG, was looking for a way to better share information between workers spread across some 80 countries. “Initiated by our market intelligence department we started a social business adoption pilot with 200 employees that quickly expanded to some 3000 users. This pilot generated high user satisfaction and clearly showed us the value of social business for Sika,” said Andreas Kissling, head of Sika Group IT.
Edited by
Alisen Downey
