'Net Features : ibm

Smarter Commerce Delivers Intelligence to CMOs

Michael Garrity — Wed, 30 May 2012 11:00:00 GMT

IBM continues to aim high with its digital marketing software, releasing some new products as part of the company’s Smarter Commerce initiative.

The new software and services, announced during the Smarter Commerce Global Summit, is geared towards chief marketing officers (CMO) and offers them the ability to deliver personalized digital experiences to individual customers using mobile devices and social media channels. In other words, IBM wants to help CMOs stay on top of the latest Web trends.

Marketers will be able to use IBM’s software and services to discover immediate intelligence about consumer shopping trends and act on this data based on customer preferences through marketing and promotional activities. Smarter Commerce services let marketers know information about specific consumer use tendencies, such as which devices they prefer to browse on compared to those they use to actually make purchases.

This initiative began as an attempt to help marketers capitalize on the growing trend of mobile device usage, which is expected to exceed desktop usage by 2014, by helping them capture a customer’s device type and analyze how differently they respond to marketing campaigns on each one. This insight can help Web pros develop, market and execute personalized digital campaigns for every unique customer’s specific mobile and tablet experience.

IBM is also offering a new Mobile Strategy Accelerator that companies can use to adopt and build a roadmap for establishing stronger relationships with customers through their mobile devices.

On the social front, IBM announced several features being added to its Smarter Commerce software and services designed to help marketers balance their current customer information with data gathered from their public social media profiles, including location and product interests. Such insights should help marketing teams create relevant promotions and deals which they can post on consumers' Facebook walls or forward them directly via Twitter.

Marketers Must Consider Multiple Digital Personalities

Allison Howen — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 22:00:00 GMT

Is your business catering to all of the digital personalities of the Web?

A new study from IBM reveals intriguing insights about the state of digitally connected consumers and how their behaviors and personalities are affecting Web businesses. According to the study, today’s connected consumers are demanding instant access to personalized content, and therefore businesses must deliver more relevant and valuable content than ever before.

The study breaks down the types of digital personalities so that Web companies can better and more effectively offer more intriguing content to their visitors.

The new digital personalities were broken up into the following four categories:

Efficiency Experts - This is the study's largest group at 41 percent. These consumers tend to see the adoption of digital devices and services as a way to make life easier.
Content Kings - This digital personality (9 percent) loves content, and includes consumers that are dedicated gamers, newshounds, movie buffs, music lovers and TV fans.
Social Butterflies - These consumers (15 percent) constantly want to access their friends via social networks.
Connected Maestros - This personality (35 percent) combines the behaviors common to Content Kings and Social Butterflies, but with even more sophisticated behaviors.

Because of these digital personalities, businesses should develop more strategic and personalized relationships with their consumers in order to stay connected with them. This can be done by providing experiences that are tailored to the specific personalities of a business' main consumers.

For example, a business that has an audience mostly made up of Efficiency Experts would want to make sure that their Web content is optimized for desktop computers, smartphones and tablet devices, both through user-friendly websites and innovative apps – whereas a business that has an audience mostly made up of Connected Maestros would want to make sure they have a strong social media presence as well as top-notch content, and may even want to consider adding social login or gamification features to their websites.

Cloud-based Analytics Solution from IBM

Linc Wonham — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 11:00:00 GMT

IBM has announced a new cloud-based Web analytics and digital marketing suite designed to help organizations automate online marketing campaigns across channels such as websites, social media networks and mobile.

The IBM Coremetrics Web Analytics and Digital Marketing Optimization Suite provides analytics designed to help companies better determine the effectiveness of new products and services, fine-tune marketing campaigns and create personalized offers in real-time across all online channels. It automates and simplifies a company’s ability to design and deliver a tailored online experience and marketing promotions through real-time personalized recommendations, email ad targeting, and more:

• Enables marketers to perform advanced segmentation and automate marketing execution based on multichannel data, including off-line data sources

• Delivers real-time product recommendations for all online channels, including social, mobile, email, and display ads

• Provides A/B testing capabilities to help search engine marketers compare pairs of search terms to determine the most cost-effective terms and associated ads

• Incorporates best practice key performance indicators and corresponding industry-specific benchmarks

• Supports deep analysis into how customers interact with a brand over time and when each marketing program is the most effective.

Data Analytics for Midmarket CIO’s

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 19:24:00 GMT

The demand for actionable insights from analytics data was cited as the number one priority in a recent survey of midmarket chief information officers (CIOs) by IBM (The IBM Global CIO Study: The Essential CIO - PDF. Midsize businesses, together with small enterprises, are responsible for nearly 65 percent of the global GDP, representing more than 90 percent of all businesses and employing over 90 percent of the world's workforce.

Finding a way to harness all that data available in videos, blogs, and social web content is key to gaining insight on and expanding relationships with customers and partners for midmarket CIOs. "As the economy recovers and CIOs look more to driving transformation in their companies, their role is evolving to become more and more associated with extracting value from technology and gaining insight from complex systems," said Ed Abrams, vice president of marketing for IBM's global midmarket business.

Findings from the study include:

- 83 percent identified analytics as their top-priority investment area.
- 72 percent of CIOs at midsize organizations are focused on integrating business and technology to drive innovation.
- In the next five years, those CIOs cited gaining deeper insight and intelligence (77 percent), people skills (68 percent), and client intimacy (67 percent) as topping their priority lists.
- 72 percent of CIOs surveyed plan to invest in mobility solutions, including smart phones and mobile applications (an 11 percent over 2009).
- CIOs are now 50 percent more likely to pursue investments in cloud computing over the next three to five years.

SugarCRM Gets Social with IBM, Google, Cisco and Citrix

Pete Prestipino — Sat, 09 Apr 2011 14:00:00 GMT

CRM solution SugarCRM released several additions to Sugar 6 including most notably integration with applications from IBM, Google, Cisco WebEx, and Citrix Online.

“Today’s professionals are demanding business tools that enable them to work the way they want to work – in a connected, always-on world with fewer barriers,” said Larry Augustin, CEO of SugarCRM. “No other CRM platform offers the breadth of social business and collaboration offerings in such and open and flexible manner.”

Sugar 6 improved its integration offerings for the IBM Lotus Collaboration product family, resulting from the recent acquisition of iExtensions CRM from iEnterprises. SugarCRM and IBM are also announcing general availability of Sugar for IBM LotusLive, first introduced earlier this year, which lets users schedule/host Web meeting from inside their CRM solution and creating a more broader social collaboration platform.

Better collaboration tools are definitely in focus right now. For example, the latest edition of Sugar 6 will offer integrations with popular web meeting tools including Cisco WebEx Meeting Centre and Citrix-GoToMeeting, and let users upload, manage and share Google Docs right inside the Sugar 6 user interface.

Activity streams in Sugar 6 also got a few new features. Sugar Activity Streams include the ability to reply to individual posts, view user profile photos within posts, integrate a Sugar user’s Facebook news feeds, as well as integrate the Twitter streams that a Sugar user follows.

SugarCRM Gets Sweeter with LotusLive Integration

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 17:36:00 GMT

CRM software SugarCRM annouced a new integration with the IBM LotusLive collaboration suite, the first in a series of offerings following SugarCRM joining the IBM Global Alliance Portfolio as a cloud solutions provider.

The integration between SugarCRM and LotusLive enables Sugar users to manage meetings at the account, contact, opportunity and support case level, access LotusLive directly from the Sugar Shortcut Bar, launch web and audio meetings directly from the Sugar user interface, and attach notes and documents to a Sugar record, and share them with customers via LotusLive.

“The integration of LotusLive capabilities with SugarCRM provides a powerful set of tools for all of our users,” said Larry Augustin, chief executive officer of SugarCRM. “Now, sales and support professionals can connect directly with prospects and customers in an instant, helping to provide higher service levels and shorter sales cycles.”

The LotusLive integration is targeted to be generally available to all SugarCRM users later this spring.

IBM’s Predictive Analytics Software Understands You

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 12 May 2010 14:20:00 GMT

IBM announced new software that will enable users to discover and analyze information from social media sources, merging that information with internal data to gain insights and predictive intelligence. You might be thinking that this isn’t really any different from any other analytics solution (predictive or otherwise) but you would be wrong – very, very wrong.

What makes the data mining and text analytics software unique is that it allows for the monitoring of changes in attitudes, uncovering insights and predicting key factors that will influence customer acquisition and retention campaigns. For example, companies can now extract sentiment from the use of emoticons and slang terminology that people often use in describing their view toward a product or service. Did that just blow your mind? Because it just blew mine!

Customers of IBM’s predictive analytics software can directly access text, web and survey data and integrate it into predictive models for recommendations, ultimately making better business decisions. It uses natural language processing (NLP) to allow clients to pull key concepts, opinions and categories relevant to their business from these data sources to uncover deeper customer insights.

Organizations can combine all of their structured data with textual information from documents, e-mails, call center notes, and social media sources, extracting, discovering and exploring relationships between concepts and sentiments, including emoticons and slang terminology at a specific time and through a specific channel.

A good example of this in action comes from Rosetta Stone, a provider of technology-based language-learning solutions. Seeking to proactively capture and analyze consumer responses, the company relies on IBM’s predictive analytics software to reveal trends in text responses from online customer product reviews, competitor websites and open-ended survey questionnaires and recognize why certain customers are brand promoters or brand detractors, and improve customer satisfaction, product development and marketing effectiveness.

Nino Ninov, vice president of strategic research and analysis at Rosetta Stone, said, "Predictive analytics allows us to leverage unsolicited and unbiased customer feedback and strategically improve our business. We now can also monitor competitor and industry websites, including blogs and news feeds, and other publicly available textual information to maintain a current view and better understand how the public perceives our competition."

Top Cloud Service Providers; Amazon, Google and IBM

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 01:52:00 GMT

Each and every day it seems an announcement is made about the availability of a new cloud service. With so many providers on the market, how should you decide which one is right for you? Perhaps you could listen to your colleagues.

Evans Data conducted a survey in September of over 400 software developers, measuring perceptions of leading vendors in the cloud space. Vendors and providers such as Amazon, Microsfot, AT&T, Rackspace, VMware, Sun and HP among others. Adoption, adoption intentions, completeness of offering, and ability to execute were rated by the developers along with capabilities such as security, scalability, low latency, reliability, no vendor lock-in, and cost to value ratio. In addition, developers positioned the vendors as better suited to either public or private cloud offerings.

So who are the top cloud service providers as rated by survey participants?

- Amazon was seen as having the most complete solution
- Google was thought to have more ability to execute (and actually topped Amazon in most other categories)
- Adoption intentions in the next 12 months were much stronger fro Google than Amazon
- IBM was thought to be able to provide the most secure cloud environment
- IBM was also rated high in reliability and ability to execute

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