Enterprise Social Solutions GM shares thoughts on Project Toscana, cloud vs. on-premises and more at IBM Connect event
IBM Enterprise Social Solutions GM Jeff Schick emceed the company’s recent Connect conference in Orlando, where Big Blue updated customers and partners on its latest collaboration, mobile and cloud efforts, emphasizing a message of “Make Every Moment Count.” Schick managed to squeeze in a few of those precious moments for reporters to follow up with him on the company’s direction in social and collaboration business, an operation that he’s been part of since 2006, including as the creator of the IBM Connections enterprise social platform.
Here’s a slightly condensed transcript of Schick’s thoughts on where IBM is headed in this area:
On IBM’s Collaboration portfolio
We have a very large on-premises business and a very fast growing cloud-based business. At this stage we have symmetry between the offerings: We have a mail offering on prem [currently Notes, but IBM Verse is headed there too], we have it in the cloud; we have a social network for work on premises, we also have that in the cloud. In the 2014 timeframe we really focused ourselves from a development point of view on cloud first and continuous development and delivery. We have the opportunity then to make snapshots of those technologies and build them out as on-premises releases. Whereas in the cloud we will make updates every single week, on premises we’re good for probably a major release every year for each of the respective on-premises technologies that are part of the collaboration portfolio.
On cloud adoption by customers
Those organizations that are interested in cloud and think it is a viable option for their company, then they’re thinking of that in terms of mail, office productivity, social networking, meetings, chat. They’re thinking about that holistically. We’re not seeing companies coming to the conclusion often that say we’re willing to put our mail there but not our chat. It’s usually, if I’m considering cloud for collaboration, I’m willing to do that across a set of collaboration capabilities… Most people are not securing meeting services on premises any longer. It’s almost gone fully towards a cloud-based model. Mail is growing more so. Social networking, look, it started with some of the larger consumer-based providers…. From our vantage point at least for a long period of time there will be an on-premises because because of governance and compliance. That’s not to say we haven’t solved many of those challenges in the cloud, but their belief system and position is based upon their sensibilities. We have built and integrated compliance technologies in the cloud so that if a bank wanted to move their mail to the cloud, the regulatory stewardship that they have over that content is absolutely possible through archiving e-discovery capabilities that are available.
On video integration
We’ve bought two major video providers, one focused on streaming, another providing that as an on-demand capable service [and IBM has created a cloud video unit]. Right now in the unified communications space you have a diversity of video: You have one-on-one video, one-on-many video [that can behave like a group chat], a meeting that’s exploiting video to see people as you’re sharing a presentation, and then in some cases that presentation sharing could be spawned in lecture mode, and then you have live streaming. The part of IBM that made the wasn’t necessarily the collaboration business, but I like it, I’m going to exploit it, I’m going to add it to offerings so that your social network can have streaming video as part of it. I really see that also happening as a statement of when you look at [IBM’s SoftLayer cloud platform] and the SoftLayer set of services you start to look at here are things that I can do through SoftLayer APIs to administer, manage…even in commerce, file management, video services. That’s not unlike some of the moves you’re seeing made by Amazon in terms of the services they are making inherently as part of their cloud-based offering.
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SOURCE: Network World
Bob Brown
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