Ibm News & Articles

As our month's focus on enterprise collaboration draws to a close, we know now that collaboration is the act of working together towards a common goal and enterprise collaboration is a group of people working to achieve the goals agreed upon by those in an enterprise. Over the past couple of years, we have seen a large number of Enterprise CMS vendors develop software products to help people in the enterprise do just that.

Conference season is in full swing. While South By Southwest has dominated the news for a while, next week brings info360. Formally known as the AIIM International Conference and Expo, info360 will come to Washington, DC, and with it bring together thousands of business and IT professionals to learn about the changing and emerging technologies and their place in helping the enterprise drive business processes, collaboration, knowledge sharing and decision making. We’ll be covering it live and already our schedules are full of meetings and can’t-miss events.

In November, collaboration specialist eXpresso (news, site) announced that it was no longer offering its services directly, but instead that it was teaming up with IBM (news, site)  and others. There was speculation that it might be some time before anything was heard from them, but here we are only three months later and it has announced that its document collaboration software is now available on LotusLive.

If Dell is riding high on some impressive figures for fiscal 2010 announced this week, it’s just about certain that it’s tinged with a little bit of unease with the announcement also this week that HP (news, site) is about to close a deal on the acquisition of Vertica.

Over the past 12 months, there has been a lot of movement in the business intelligence market from both established vendors and new entrants, making it difficult to distinguish old trends and future possibilities.

Gartner, however, has released its Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence, in which a number of themes have become a lot clearer. Over the coming years, Gartner said, ease-of-use, complexity of analysis, scale and performance, and total cost of ownership will continue to dominate BI market requirements.

One of the big stories this year in the document and document management software space is going to be office suites in the cloud. This week alone there have been at least three developments in this area, from Microsoft, IBM and Google. In the document collaboration space, Workshare document comparison software now integrates with Open Text’s eDocs.

Lots of big news in the E2.0 world this week! Read on for details on everything from the grand opening of an entire social network for the enterprise (Chatter.com) to IBM's new social business initiative. 

This week, IBM held its Lotusphere get together, offering Big Blue a chance to highlight some of its recent releases -- two of which target the SMB market specifically, Google and Verizon got together to offer SMB bundled apps, HubSpot goes social and CMSWire goes to the White House.

Data centers and telecommunication companies are facing up to the challenge of meeting the demand for cloud computing. In the Asia Pacific region alone, the market for cloud computing services is forecast to grow in the medium term. To address this demand from both the private and public sector, infrastructure providers are starting to ramp up their capacity.

IBM joins the charge to corner the market for Web office productivity suites with the launch of LotusLive Symphony for the cloud, an office suite that offers a social platform enabling simultaneous collaboration on documents in the cloud.

This week in the GRC space, there were significant releases from both EMC and IBM’s new acquisition OpenPages. Compliance vendor Compliance 360 looks ahead in 2011 to how the directors of major corporations will react to GRC over the year, and open source OpenLogic reports record sales driven by its new open source compliance offering.

Busy week here in the document management mines. Alfresco made its document management software social, LibreOffice continued to expand its reach by adding portable functionality, Xerox bought some new document collaboration software with WaterWare and Oce took a look at the benefits of document imaging.

Lotusphere has kicked off in Orlando, Florida today and there's a steady stream of tweets coming in already. Some of the big news is centered on IBM's new Social Business Initiative, packed with mobile, cloud productivity and a new social business framework.

While a significant set of analytics tools is just about mandatory for large enterprises at this point, smaller businesses are heading that way too. To help them on their way, IBM (news, site) has just released an ‘express’ version of their analytics product, Cognos, which it targeted specifically at the SMB space.

Just about two years after IBM (news, site) announced the release of its LotusLive cloud collaboration platform, IBM continues to extend the reach of LotusLive with the announcement of integrations with SugarCRM and Ariba’s social commerce platform.