I love three-peats. With the offensive firepower of Shaq and Kobe, the Lakers did it twice since 2009. And, the Niners almost did it a decade ago when Montana and Rice were breaking NFL records right and left. And being a fan of both teams, life has been good growing up.
Just last week, IDC ranked IBM number one in worldwide market share for enterprise social software for the third consecutive year. According to IDC’s analysis of 2011 revenue, IBM grew faster than its competitors and nearly two times faster than the overall market which grew approximately 40 percent.
The aggressive rise of enterprise social business software is obvious given the recent acquisitions over the last 24 months; and the technology innovation coming from the social media vendor space. Almost every vendor has their eyes set on providing tools and solutions for enterprise customers. This shift of consumer to business networking has caused a ripple affect for organizations looking to adopt these skills within their organizations to better reach clients and suppliers, while swiftly gaining insight on the data being created in these networks. The winners in this race will be able to react more swiftly to customer trends, increase employee morale and out innovate competitors.
Why has IBM emerged as the marketplace leader in enterprise collaboration software?
While internal social networking is becoming one of the most significant shifts in the enterprise, very few companies have demonstrated the benefits, roadmap and client success stories like IBM. Today, more than 400,000 IBM employees are collaborating through IBM Connections (their social business platform.) As a result, more than 67,000 internal communities have been developed, 475,000 files shared globally have generated more than 9 million downloads. Every day, IBM generates 35 million instant message chats behind the firewall. Additionally, 35 percent of Fortune 100 companies have adopted IBM’s social software offerings including eight of the top 10 retailers and banks.
The following is a brief example that highlights IBM’s software solution in action. Here is another IBM case study for reference.
LeasePlan, one of the leading vehicle leasing and fleet management companies in the world, is using IBM Connections across the multi-national company of over 40 subsidiaries, in 30 countries and over 6,000 employees. LeasePlan is using IBM Connections for knowledge retention, optimizing workflow, increasing innovation, and transforming business processes. Nearly 800 communities have been formed, 400 blogs, and over 800 forums are all helping the organization decrease the amount of emails sent and received, helping the workforce easily find expertise and saving employees valuable time.
In 2009, LeasePlan launched an initial pilot with Connections including 170 employees from three business units in 30 countries. While the pilot was under restricted use, approx 1,000 employees who heard about the program wanted to take part. After the pilot program was complete, ninety-four percent of the participants said they wanted to continue the project. LinkedPeople began developing a full launch in Q1 2010.
Wim de Gier, LeasePlan’s Senior Global Project Manager Corporate Strategy & Development says, “LinkedPeople makes it easy to find people with specific expertise. Employees create personal profiles that include information such as their background, expertise, and links to articles or papers they have written. By searching tags, users can locate specific information and find colleagues suited to answer particular questions. Users can also find questions relating to their expertise that they can answer.”
