I am here on the ground at IBM’s gala Lotusphere annual event. If I didn’t see it for my own eyes, I wouldn’t believe it. Social Business is all the rage and the main storyline IBM is taking to its customers going forward.
IBM Executives are describing “social” as the next wave in enterprise computing:
Mainframe > Departmental > PC > Internet > Social
According to Alistair Rennie, General Manager for Collaboration Solutions, who gave this morning’s keynote, “It’s the most important Lotusphere ever.” He credited social business as key to combining people and technology, a goal IBM has been working on for decades.
What’s significant to me in this endorsement is that one of the icons of Enterprise (the “I” in MISO) is touting social as a must-do, not a fad or a trendy adaptation of consumer technology. This only bodes well for companies and organizations of all sizes, as selling the “vision” of social is half the battle in getting something started.
So IBM, you go girl. Bring it.
(I will be here throughout the week. Looking forward to talking to many IBM customers about their experiences. If you are an IBM customer interested in learning how to “go social,” please join us this evening at 5pm in Asia 3 at the Dolphin. You can talk to other earlyvangelists who’ve been at this for a while.)