Ibm News & Articles

IBM is spending like there’s no tomorrow. Two more companies have just landed in its net, both of which will grow its analytics business on one hand – particularly its Smart Commerce drive – and on the other hand its mobile communications strategy.

With smartphones now outselling PCs and a recent global CIO  study showing 75% of respondents targeting mobile as a top spending priority, IBM took action to secure its place in the mobile enterprise domain, announcing a "definitive agreement" to acquire mobile app and infrastructure software developer Worklight.

“Our clients are under increased pressure to meet the growing demands of a workforce and customer base that now treat mobility as mission critical to their business,” said Marie Wieck, general manager, IBM application and infrastructure middleware.

IBM Symphony appears to have arrived at the end of the road. It’s not exactly unexpected, given the moves in productivity and collaboration space. According to Ed Brill, Director of Messaging and Collaboration Solutions at IBM, the release of Lotus Symphony 3.0.1 is likely to be the last release of the free productivity suite.

Last week, we saw that Big Blue had a pretty good quarter in Q4 and a good year overall in 2011. IBM attributed the success to a number of core areas, analytics being one of them. Netezza was one of the purchased products that contributed to the results, and has announced a new release that should help IBM do well in 2012.

IBM is like a weather vane; it points the way the wind is blowing, at least in information management. For that reason, its financial results are important. Q4 results released late last night, showing an increase of revenues by 2% to US$ 29.5 billion, are no exception, especially when its CFO Mark Loughbirdge indicated that 2012 looks like it will produce a Big Blue buying spree, just like 2010.

Lotusphere throws up all kinds of new partnerships. One of them from this year’s event is between social media intelligence vendor MutualMind and Big Blue. As a result, users of Lotus Notes and Connections will be able to embed MutualMind’s Social Business Enterprise application.

Rapidly expanding customer relationship management company SugarCRM announced integrations with IBM, including support for IBM DB2 database software and a move to IBM SmartCloud Enterprise.

This week in the GRC space, IBM released its identity intelligence software, Symantec had a busy week with the acquisition of LiveOffice and its rethink of intelligent information governance, CMSWire’s contributors visited the governance space, particularly around website governance and Qualtrax upgraded to v4.3.

So we've told you about the latest version of IBM Connections, unveiled at Lotusphere 2012 this morning. But that's not all IBM announced. We also saw a new socially enabled enterprise content management solution and a brand new cloud-based productivity suite.

IBM Connections is getting a major overhaul and it looks like the last two years of hard work by IBM has taken the social collaboration platform to a whole new level.

If it's time for a change, we've got a shopping list of hot jobs in our spiffy little corner of the world. Our bi-weekly featured jobs list is a great collection of opportunities spanning specialties and continents. Here's who's hiring this week.  

It's all about social today. It's a part of everything we do, both personally and in business. IBM recognizes this and has introduced a number of new initiatives today that will help its clients and partners transform their businesses by taking advantage of social capabilities. Here's what they are doing.

Big Blue may have changed leadership, but its strategy doesn’t appear to be changing at all, except for a more targeted focus on cloud technologies and acquisitions that give IBM what it doesn’t have already. It announced it has closed the acquisition of Platform Computing, a Toronto-based cloud management software provider.

Sure, this site is mostly about code, services, web technology and stuff-in-the-cloud. But if you can't run the end result on a smart-looking box, what's the point? Check out the latest tablets from Lenovo, Acer and Toshiba with some office skills, full HD and super-sleek looks, for work or play anywhere, but all of them live in the shadow of the iPad 3.

With Virginia Rometty now installed in the cockpit of IBM, one of the things that many are waiting to see is whether she is going to continue the buying spree that appeared reinvigorated at the end of last year. The announcement that Big Blue has just bought UK-based Green Hat seems to suggest she will.