IBM Connections Cloud Application Development Strategy

Editor's Notes

1. For our talk today we are going to focus on some of the trends we see occurring within the industry, we’ll provide a quick overview of our IBM Connections Cloud set of services and talk about how you can integrate and customize applications within that cloud environment. Then we will wrap it up with next steps and information we think would be useful for you if you are in need of more details.
2. Some of the trends we see happening is that there continues to be more and more usage of social across an organization. Companies are finding this useful in business as a result 2/3’s of enterprises plan to continue to increase their investment plans in social. Some companies have been waiting and watching and learning the value of social in small pockets but we are continuing to see this expansion.
3. As companies continue that investment in social they have been more diligent and purposeful around obtaining the return on investment. Many are creating adoption strategies so they can better correlate the investment in the tools to real business outcomes. In discussions with our customers and in the market on average we are seeing an increase in the investment around social as there is more and more information available to companies that show how this can change the way you work. It can bring your users together better, connect them in realtime or video and capture that knowledge in an organization and share it more pervasively. In addition being able to use these tools at your desk or on the go with mobile devices are really starting to change the way companies are thinking.
4. Naturally we also watch what the analysts are saying and according to the Magic Quadrant for Social Software last year they are continuing to predict this market to grow even more. They are projecting approximately $8B by 2019. The other interesting part is if you contrast this to 10 years ago this wasn’t even a market category. They weren’t sure where to define this and now not only is it a full category but the grow is continuing to accelerate.
5. According to Altimeter executives in particular are not only interested in social for themselves but for their employees and the rate and pace of which they believe this is a priority has jumped 1645 since 2013. These are good indicators that companies are starting to not only understand these technologies but building it into their strategies moving forward. The other piece I think you’ll see moving rapidly which Altimeter also calls out here is the digital aspects. Driving customers, partners and employees to use digital move to market their solutions, drive customer usage and more – these numbers will continue to climb. This is part of the reason we have coined the phrase “A New Way to Work” as we believe the trends in the market are forcing us to all work in new ways and our solutions are well situated to help companies better collaborate and social interact.
6. So let’s talk a little more about our solutions.
7. To drive us forward the strategy we are supporting when we are building our solutions and this maps to what you are seeing within the marketplace we believe it’s paramount to think about mobile, the ability to access that information within a cloud environment, seamlessly integrated social components to help in connecting the workforce, using analytics to surface the right information at the right time all within a secure environment. See let’s talk about our solutions that showcase these strategies.
8. The Enterprise Social Solutions – we are IBM so we call ourselves “ESS” … we provide a fully integrated collaborative experience. That experience includes Mail, Social, Meetings, Documents, Chat and of course mobile. All of these tools will allow you to change the way you work. We not only provide a rich web experience but we have a complimentary rich mobile environment of which we will show you in a few moments. This is available in deployment models of your choice and is built on an open architecture.
9. When we take a step back and look at our solutions -- we realize we build these for the individuals and teams within an organization at the center of this image. However to truly make that successful it’s important to have an ecosystem surrounding that.
10. Part of that ecosystem is enabling a level of customization or additional components that a customer may want to add. As such customers demand and should demand of their software vendors to create extensible platforms. Creating an open environment is a must in today environment - Luis will talk to in more detail when he shows you some of the ways in which you can integrate into our applications to demonstrate that extensibility.
11. This is a quote from Forrester which rings true with our strategy as well – there are many applications in the market today that offer robust activity streams, blogs, wikis and more but the place where we battle and where you will see a large investment and focus from IBM is in the space of Analytics, integration and partner ecosystems. In our talk today we will focus on the integration and ecosystem but know we have core analytics built into our solutions as well.
12. To give you an example of our ecosystem this is a sampling of the partners that either integrate and / or provide unique applications using our IBM Connections Cloud platform. You’ll see there are some that add value to our social solutions such as Actiance which is a partner that provides compliance – we work with a variety of video partners like Kaltura – we integrate with Hootsuite and the list goes on. Since this is just a sampling and we don’t want to leave any of our partners out please feel free to visit our App Catalog located at catalog.lotus.com. This site is where partners can post their solutions in addition we also provide extension points and plug-ins as well.
13. Now let’s pivot to talk about our App Dev strategy and how we want to build and cultivate an ecosystem.
14. From an IBM perspective we have continue to focus on providing the ability for developers to access our the plethora of IBM technologies using our IBM Bluemix approach. Bluemix in simple terms is all about open standards, using the cloud as a platform so developers can build, run and manage their applications. If you want more information in general about IBM Bluemix we encourage you to visit the showcase area. This program is key for us as we want to provide our services as part of this environment so developers can take advantage of our capabilities.
15. The other IBM program we are working with as the IBM Cloud Marketplace. This is becoming the place to go for all our of digital assets. In addition this team is helping to build capabilities that other teams can leverage for instance when we are looking at providing trials and / or eCommerce transactions. Both IBM Bluemix and IBM Cloud Marketplace are areas we will continue to look for how our collaborative portfolio can be provided given us better reach to the development community.
16. Let’s talk more specifically about our portfolio and how it relates to App Dev. As we continue to build our solutions for customers wanting both an on premises and cloud environments we have narrowed our focus on 3 key areas we believe will help us in continuing to expand that ecosystem which is vital to our success. One, we want to engage developers that are familiar with our on premises environment and move them to the cloud. While we have access to similar APIs when we are working within a multi tenant environment we need to ensure that the integration points behave correctly so as not to compromise that environment. Secondly, we want to embrace those programs I talked about a moment ago such as IBM Bluemix and move our services so developers can take advantage of key areas that they may want for instance they may want to use Bluemix since we host some of our services and that alleviates the need for them to manage that deployment. Or perhaps it’s leveraging our services such as file sharing to be added to a customer application they are creating. Lastly, we want to support an open platform where partners can provide complimentary solutions. I’m going to pass things over to Luis to talk in more detail about how this will work.
17. BlueMix is our gateway to provide an instance of Domino . For Connections, BlueMix leverages our SaaS environment.
18. BlueMix is our gateway to provide an instance of Domino . For Connections, BlueMix leverages our SaaS environment.
19. BlueMix is our gateway to provide an instance of Domino . For Connections, BlueMix leverages our SaaS environment.
20. BlueMix is our gateway to provide an instance of Domino . For Connections, BlueMix leverages our SaaS environment.
21. BlueMix is our gateway to provide an instance of Domino . For Connections, BlueMix leverages our SaaS environment.
22. The key takeaways are that IBM offers the richest set of collaborative and social capabilities all integrated into a single experience. Customers can pick and choose the capabilities they would like to use, naturally we believe the value proposition when these are all combined together is the strongest. We want to ensure customers can collaborate both internally and externally, and very important to stress in a secure manner, with our platform. In closing all of this is available on whatever deployment model works for the customer.