IBM Connections, a cornerstone of IBM’s social platform

Available on premises, in the cloud, and on a broad range of mobile devices, IBM Connections integrates activity streams, calendaring, wikis, blogs, a new email capability, and more, and flags relevant data for action. It allows for instant collaboration with one simple click and the ability to build social, secure communities both inside and outside the organization to increase customer loyalty and speed business results. The new Connections mail capability provides simplified access to email within the context of the social networking environment.

Now, organizations can integrate and analyze massive amounts of data generated from people, devices and sensors and more easily align these insights to business processes to make faster, more accurate business decisions. By gaining deeper insights in customer and market trends and employees’ sentiment, businesses can uncover critical patterns to not only react swiftly to market shifts, but predict the effect of future actions.

“I am thoroughly enjoying the ability to engage with a variety of employees through micro-blogging,” said Patrick Thomas, CEO, Bayer MaterialScience. “I can get information out quickly, but even more importantly I can encourage two way communication and stimulate an open communication culture by breaking through barriers.”

The new capabilities empower employees from every line of business, such as marketing, human resources and development to gain actionable insight into the information being generated in their social networks.

For example, the Connections landing page features a single location that allows users to view and interact with content from any third party solution through a social interface, right alongside their company’s content, including email and calendar. The embedded experience of the news feed, also known as an activity stream, allows employees from any department inside an organization to explore structured and unstructured data such as Twitter feeds, Facebook posts, weather data, videos, log files, SAP applications, electronically sign documents, and quickly act on the data as part of their everyday work experience.

To learn more about IBM’s social business initiative, participate in a simulcast on September 13, 2012 at  1 PM ET at bit.ly/Pn9sqd or sign-up to attend IBM’s Connect conference (t.c.f.k.a. Lotusphere ) in January 2013.

For more information, please visit www.ibm.com/press/socialbusiness