Ibm News & Articles

This week we reviewed a handful of different platforms for enterprise collaboration, saw big names like IBM crawl out of less-than-social caves, and once again celebrated the awesomeness of e-mail. Meanwhile, experts admonished us to beware of getting too carried away, lest social Frankensteins rise from our laboratories.  

HootSuite has been busy making lives easier with a number of new announcements over the month of August including a private beta of their HootSuite for Blackberry. For cloud service vendors, there’s also some good news on SMB adaptation of SaaS and hybrid systems.

Evidently, IBM (news, site) is trying very hard to believe in social media. Forty-five percent of the company's Business Partners are experimenting with a social media business strategy to generate new revenue, even though most of them (three quarters) are still unsure of how to apply it as an effective sales tool. 

If you missed the recent upgrade to Ephox’s (news, site) web reporting tool WebRadar 2.0 then you will have a chance to catch up with it and get some kind of idea where it’s going at the current Annual Atech xChange conference.

It’s been a busy summer for mergers and acquisitions, and looks set to continue. In the case of IBM (news, site) who reportedly paid US$ 400 million for security firm BigFix and closed the deal on July 20, they have already used the company to produce new software for compliance and content security.

This week from a GRC perspective was always going to be about announcements from the International Legal Technology Association’s (ILTA) conference in Las Vegas that runs until tomorrow. Nearly everyone is there including Autonomy, Open Text, IBM and Recommind. But there are others too and we’ll catch up with them next week.

The rise of Information Management as a business priority seems inexorable. But how do you go about taming the beast?

It's been a busy week in the SharePoint space with the release of a new tool for integration with Documentum, as well as integration with ComponentOne’s Doc-To-Help for SharePoint library access.

Only days after IBM announced the acquisition of document capture vendor Datacap, Big Blue has snatched Unica (news, site) -- a marketing management developer that automates, manages and accelerates core business processes across marketing channels.

Continuing its run on acquisitions -- even if breaking the recent mould of buying to expand its analytics business -- IBM (news, site) has just announced the acquisition of document capture vendor Datacap.

With most things it’s really the small things that count. With Google Docs it’s just one small thing after another. The most recent is the announcement this week that Google Docs users will be able to translate their documents into 52 other languages thanks to native integration of Google Translate into Docs.

If IBM’s (news, site)  stock slid on Tuesday after it announced second quarter revenues that were a tad lower than market expectations, then no one at IBM appears particularly panicked as it still reported profits of US$ 3.4bn, up 9% on the same quarter last year and expects to finish off this year with revenues fully on target.

Security is the big concern this week on the GRC front with Big Blue closing the BigFix deal that offers them better enterprise and database security, while Adobe also looks to the security of Adobe Reader with a new sandbox solution. Meanwhile, SAP and CA also get together this week for a combined GRC solution.

Last October, DAM developer MediaBeacon (news, site) hired Tom Rieger, ex-IBM, Informix and FileNet director. At the time we asked what he was going to do there. The integration of MediaBeacon’s DAM platform into IBM’s (news, site) Lotus WCM and WebSphere Portal probably helps answer that.

This week is dominated by e-Discovery with the release of new software from Autonomy that the company says will dramatically cut times and costs in legal review, while IBM and PSS Systems integrate for better legal hold. Social media and compliance is also the target of a new release from LiveOffice.