IBM had been aggressively investing in social business initiatives since 2007 when company set up a separate unit for selling social business software under the brand name Connections and has built a significant customer base for this business.

1. Analysis & Outlook
Rajesh Prabhakar Analyst Bio @ http://analysiscasestudy.blogspot.com/
IBM had been aggressively investing in social business initiatives since 2007 when company set
up a separate unit for selling social business software under the brand name Connections and has
built a significant customer base for this business. The company further boosted these initiatives
with the launching of IBM Customer Experience Lab headquartered at the Thomas J. Watson
Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., and supported by researchers at IBM's 12 global
labs, including Africa, Brazil, California, China, India, Israel, Japan, Switzerland and Texas. The
lab merges skills across disciplines, including service science, industries research, mathematics
and business optimization, social, mobile, Smarter Commerce, data mining, cloud computing,
security and privacy, cognitive computing and systems management. IBM had realized the fact
that growing social networks not only impact people’s lives but also significantly impact the
business organizations and how they run their operations across the globe. People of all ages are
aggressively engaging on various social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn,
YouTube, etc. and also actively seeking to use those platforms even in their professional careers
within the organizations. More and more employees are bringing in their own devices to the
work place and this Bring Your Own device scenario is presenting a big challenge for business
organizations. "Customers across the world are using innumerable channels—from social
networks to online product review sites—to express their individual experience with products
and services. This is fueling an explosion of data and driving a radical shift in how companies
must engage with their customers to thrive and stay competitive," Ramesh Gopinath, director of
IBM Research India, said in a statement.
Organizations too are significantly impacted by the digitization of media, documents and
communications and have to equip their organizations with the suitable technology infrastructure
that suits these trends.IBM had been betting big on the social business and analytics as essential
for its future growth strategy and accordingly it is offering products like IBM Connections which
is their social business platform offering. IBM has introduced a new suite of social, mobile and
big data offerings to help businesses gain deeper insight into their customers' needs and desires.
IBM Customer Lab since its inception through IBM Research scientists and business consultants
have worked with more than 100 global clients and co-created a range of new technologies and
services transformed and revolutionized the way companies interact and engage with customers.
Digitization and digital customers had forced the organizations assess their brand loyalty
initiatives and increase business growth by not looking at customers as mass audiences but
putting more emphasis increasing the value of personalized customer relationships. IBM is
considered to be the market leader in the Social business software segment and as companies
across the globe realizing the need to integrate the social networking platforms within the
organization for both employee and customer engagement By focusing on the social business
segment before the competition it is able to create dominant position in the initial stages of
uncontested market place and the value innovation proposition it is offering is also is attractive
for the clients as the clients are seeing significant return on investment.
Blue Ocean Strategy @ IBM – Customer Experience Lab Social Business&Analytics focus