TurboTech: The Flying Solo, Almost Live From Bangalore Edition

My time in Bangalore is coming to a rapid close, but I wanted to provide a quick, solo edition of “TurboTech” as I prepare to jet out of here overnight. I can’t say enough good things about my experience here this week, or about the new team I’m going to be working with here.  They’ve been a lot of fun despite the long meetings and hard work, and I expect it won’t be long before I’m back for another visit.

Meanwhile, my cricket knowledge doubles every passing day, and at least now I can honestly say I can explain the difference between a “sixer” and an “over.”  I had hoped to get a ticket to the Mumbai Indians game this evening as part of the Champion’s League T20 this evening, but they were all sold out!

Hopefully Scott and I will be able to get our social calendars linked up once I’m back to Austin, and the stopwatch will be making its return engagement.

IBM X-Force Trends Report: Year Of The Security Breach

Attacker types and techniques in 1H2011 identified by the IBM X-Force Mid-Year Trend & Risk Report. The study revealed mobile security exploits would likely double in 2011.

Okay, it’s my last day in Bangalore.  At least for this particular journey.

I don’t have any more India-related news, except to report that the Kolkata Night Riders beat the Royal Challengers Bangalore in the CLT20 last night, here in Bangalore.

KKR won by nine wickets, and now I know why there were such sad faces in the stadium as I watched the end of the match late last night on TV.

As I was watching cricket, IBM was releasing the results of its “X-Force 2011 Mid-Year Trend and Risk Report,” a tiding I always attempt to cover in some depth, both because I find the reports fascinating and enlightening, and because I consider it a real service that IBM is providing to the global IT community.

Poised at the frontline of security, the IBM X-Force team serves as the eyes and ears for thousands of IBM clients – studying security attack techniques and creating defenses before many vulnerabilities are even announced.

The X-Force Mid-Year Trend and Risk Report is based on intelligence gathered through IBM’s research of public vulnerability disclosures as well as the monitoring and analysis of an average of 12 billion security events daily since the beginning of 2011.

Drumroll, Please: Moble Exploits Are Ripe For Exploitation!

The headline: This report demonstrates the rapidly changing security landscape characterized by high-profile attacks, growing mobile vulnerabilities and more sophisticated threats such as “whaling.”

Adoption of mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets in the enterprise, including the “Bring Your Own Device” approach, which allows personal devices to access the corporate network, is raising new security concerns.

IBM X-Force has documented a steady rise in the disclosure of security vulnerabilities affecting these devices.  X-Force research recommends that IT teams consistently employ anti-malware and patch management software for phones in enterprise environments.

Click to enlarge. This graphic explores what the security situation might look like if it were run by the IBM X-Force team as they attempted to deal with this year's exploits.

Other key findings from the study:

• Malicious software targeting mobile phones is often distributed through third-party app markets. Mobile phones are an increasingly attractive platform for malware developers as the sheer size of the user base is growing rapidly, and there is an easy way to monetize mobile phone infections. Malware distributors can set up premium texting (SMS messaging) services that charge users that text to a specific number. Malware then sends text messages to those premium numbers from infected phones.
• Some mobile malware is designed to collect end user’s personal information. This data could then be used in phishing attacks or for identity theft. Mobile malware is often capable of spying on victim’s personal communications as well as monitoring and tracking their physical movements via the GPS capabilities common in these phones.

“For years, observers have been wondering when malware would become a real problem for the latest generation of mobile devices,” said Tom Cross, manager of Threat Intelligence and Strategy for IBM X-Force. “It appears that the wait is over.”

Critical Vulnerabilities Triple in 2011

The X-Force team also reports that the percentage of critical vulnerabilities has tripled thus far in 2011.

X-Force is declaring 2011 the “Year of the Security Breach” due to the large number of high-profile attacks and network compromises that have occurred this year.

This graphic explores the top website categories from the 1H2011 report containing at least one malicious link.

There is a cadre of notable emerging threats from this year’s breaches:

• Teams of professional attackers motivated by a desire to collect strategic intelligence have been able to gain and maintain access to critical computer networks through a combination of stealth, sophisticated technical capabilities and careful planning. These attackers are often referred to as “Advanced Persistent Threats” (APTs).
•  The success of APTs has raised the profile of “whaling,” a type of spear phishing which targets “big fish,” or those positioned in high levels of an organization with access to critical data. These targeted attacks are often launched after careful study of a person’s online profiles has armed an attacker with the information needed to create a compelling phishing email that the victim will be fooled into clicking on.
• Attacks from ‘hacktivist’ groups, who targeted web sites and computer networks for political ends rather than just financial gain. Hacktivist groups have been successful in using well known, off-the-shelf attack techniques such as SQL Injection, which is one of the most common attack techniques seen in the Internet.
• Anonymous proxies have more than quadrupled in number compared to three years earlier. Anonymous proxies are a critical type of website to track, because they allow people to hide potentially malicious intent.

Advances In Security

“The rash of high-profile breaches this year highlights the challenges organizations often face in executing their security strategy,” said Cross. “Although we understand how to defend against many of these attacks on a technical level, organizations don’t always have the cross-company operational practices in place to protect themselves.”

Although the X-Force team declared 2011 as a watershed in high-profile security breaches, the report also uncovered some improvements in areas of computer security that show headway in the fight against crime on the Internet.

• The first half of 2011 saw an unexpected decrease in web application vulnerabilities, from 49 percent of all vulnerability disclosures down to 37 percent.  This is the first time in five years X-Force has seen a decrease.
• High and critical vulnerabilities in web browsers were also at their lowest point since 2007, despite an increasingly complex browser market. These improvements in web browser and application security are important as many attacks are targeted against those categories of software
• As major botnet operators are taken down and off-line by law enforcement officials, the report shows a trend in the decline of spam and more traditional phishing tactics.
• After years of consistent spam growth until the middle of 2010, there has been a significant decline in spam volumes in the first half of this year.In the first half of 2011, the percentage of spam that is phishing on a weekly basis was less than 0.01 percent. Traditional phishing has greatly declined from the levels X-Force was seeing prior to the middle of 2010.

Also of note, the SQL Slammer Worm has been one of the most common sources of malicious packets on the Internet since its appearance and naming by the IBM X-Force team in 2003, but it has fallen down the list after a dramatic disappearance observed in March 2011.

The most recent analysis strongly suggested that the SQL Slammer Worm’s disappearance is due to an unknown source or actor. The analysis showed that a time-based trigger using a Slammer’s server clock was used to shut it down, proving that it was disabled by a single cause.

Traditional Vulnerabilities Still a Problem

The X-Force report uncovered numerous attacks that target traditional security vulnerabilities. According to the report, attacks on weak passwords are commonplace on the Internet, as are attacks that leverage SQL Injection vulnerabilities in web applications to compromise backend databases.

Databases have become an important target for attackers. Critical data used to run organizations — including financial/ERP, customer, employee, and intellectual property information such as new product designs — is stored in relational databases.

IBM researchers tested almost 700 web sites — from the Fortune 500 and other most popular sites — to uncover that 40 percent of these contain a class of security issues referred to as client-side JavaScript vulnerabilities. The existence of vulnerabilities like these in so many corporate web sites is indicative of the security blindspots in many organizations.

This graphic reveals insight into the exploit effort versus potential reward in the 1H 2011 X-Force report.

IBM Launches Institute for Advanced Security in Asia Pacific

To help combat security risks and to foster collaboration amongst security industry leaders, IBM is launching the IBM Institute for Advanced Security in Asia Pacific in order to combat growing security threats in the region.

The IBM Mid-Year X-Force report states that top countries originating spam have shifted to Asia Pacific, with India sending out roughly 10 percent of all spam registered today, and South Korea and Indonesia also making the top five list.

This Institute joins its predecessors in Brussels, Belgium and Washington, D.C., focused on European and U.S. clients respectively.

About the IBM X-Force Team and the Trend and Risk Report

This report comes from IBM’s X-Force team, the premier security research organization within IBM that has catalogued, analyzed and researched more than 50,000 vulnerability disclosures since 1997.

The IBM X-Force Trend and Risk Report is an annual assessment of the security landscape, designed to help clients better understand the latest security risks, and stay ahead of these threats.

It is the result of the work done in IBM’s nine global Security Operations Centers, which is provided as a managed security service to clients.

The report gathers facts from numerous intelligence sources, including its database of computer security vulnerabilities, global web crawler, international spam collectors, and the real-time monitoring of an average of 12 billion security events every day for nearly 4,000 clients in more than 130 countries.

You can learn more about and download the report here.

Don’t Even THINK About Parking Here: The First Ever IBM Global Parking Survey

Considering that traffic congestion has been an ongoing theme during my week in Bangalore, it only stands to reason that parking follows.

IBM just released its first ever parking survey, and Bangalore made the top, or near the top, on a couple of key metrics. It was first in terms of most parking tickets issued, and second (only to New Delhi) in terms of cities where drivers argued most over parking spaces.

They have parking spaces in Bangalore??

I jest, but not being able to find a parking space is no laughing matter: Which is why these results are so disturbing these results: The study found that drivers in 20 international cities face a daily struggle in finding a parking space, and in the past year, nearly six out of 10 drivers have abandoned their search for a space at least once, and more than a quarter have gotten into an argument with a fellow motorist over a parking space!

Calgon, take me away!

In addition to the typical traffic congestion caused by daily commutes and gridlock from construction and accidents, reports have estimated that over 30 percent of traffic in a city is caused by drivers searching for a parking spot.

So not only do inefficient parking systems result in congestion and increased carbon emissions, they also waste commuters’ time, lead to lost productivity and economic opportunities and can lead to inefficient city services.

IBM Global Parking Index

IBM compiled the results of the survey into its first-ever Parking Index that ranks the emotional and economic toll of parking in a cross-section of 20 international cities with the highest number being the most onerous.

The Index reveals a wide range in the parking pain experienced from city to city. Chicago had the least pain when it comes to parking in the cities studied, followed by Los Angeles and Toronto.

Here’s how the cities stack up: New Delhi: 140; Bangalore 138; Beijing 124; Moscow 122; Shenzhen 122; Paris 122; Milan 117; Nairobi 111; Madrid: 104; Singapore 97; Mexico City: 97; Stockholm: 90; Johannesburg: 87; London: 86; New York City: 85; Montreal: 85; Buenos Aires: 80; Toronto: 77; Los Angeles: 61; and Chicago: 51.

Click to enlarge image. IBM's first ever global parking survey found that drivers in 20 international cities face a daily struggle in finding a parking space. In the past year, nearly six out of 10 drivers have abandoned their search for a space at least once, and more than a quarter have gotten into an argument with a fellow motorist over a parking space.

The IBM Parking Index is comprised of the following key issues: 1) longest amount of time looking for a parking place; 2) inability to find a parking place; 3) disagreement over parking spots; 4) received a parking ticket for illegal parking and 5) number of parking tickets received.

In a related announcement, IBM is working in partnership with Streetline, a privately held company headquartered in San Francisco with smart-parking deployments in California, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Texas, Utah, and Washington D.C.

Streetline was recently named one of Fast Company’s “10 Most Innovative Companies in Transportation,” as well as, to help cities of all sizes reduce congestion, better manage parking availability and resources and put information at people’s fingertips to find parking faster.

Streetline was selected from more than 600 SmartCamp entries worldwide based on its outstanding technology, innovative business plan, and alignment with IBM’s Smarter Planet strategy.

Combining information management and advanced analytics from IBM with data gathered from parking sensors and applications from Streetline will allow cities to make smarter and more timely decisions related to parking and their transportation systems.

Officials will be able to use this smarter parking solution to better understand parking patterns so they can improve citizen services, optimize revenue and more effectively allocate city resources.

In the future, insight from the historical and real-time data being gathered can help cities become more proactive in anticipating how parking and their transportation network interacts with other city services and plan accordingly from how it might affect economic development and merchant services to how to appropriately schedule mass transit to how best to plan around infrastructure projects or special events.

Who Moved My Parking Space? Parking Reinvented

As the majority of the world’s population moves to metropolitan areas, key city systems, including city streets and transportation systems, are being strained to the breaking point.

Additionally, vehicle emissions resulting from drivers looking for parking are so closely linked that a year-long study found that drivers in a 15 block district in Los Angeles drove in excess of 950,000 miles, produced 730 tons of carbon dioxide and used 47,000 gallons of gas searching for parking.

The Smarter Parking Starter Kit is a pre-integrated solution that includes instrumentation, connectivity and intelligence. This solution is designed to help cities “get out of park” and improve parking services, optimize operations and help reduce congestion. By leveraging advanced technologies from IBM and Streetline cities will be able to:

• Provide real-time information to allow citizens and visitors to find parking more easily
• Gather, analyze and act on information about parking resources and services to optimize revenue
• Analyze real-time information to better model and anticipate problems to reduce congestion, more appropriately price parking based on demand and provide enhanced services to citizens
• Integrate real-time information from on-street and off-street parking to enable collaborative decision making for rapid response to events, changes in parking availability and demand.

Streetline’s patented smart parking platform detects the presence of a car through a network of ultra-low power wireless sensors located in individual parking spaces.

This information is then made available in real time both to the city, as well as to consumers via Parker, a free smartphone app via the iTunes Store or Android marketplace.

Using this real-time parking data combined with advanced parking analytics built on IBM Cognos, cities can then tap into this information to understand important factors including hourly occupancy, occupancy by block, parking duration, and trends by area.

Streetline was named the winner of the IBM SmartCamp World Finals and IBM Global Entrepreneur of the Year in November 2010.

About IBM and Smarter Transportation

IBM works with cities, governments and others around the world to make their transportation systems smarter. Smarter transportation systems can help traffic and public transit systems flow more smoothly, anticipate and improve congestion in advance, reduce emissions and increase the capacity of infrastructure.

To join in the conversation on Smarter Transportation, join us on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Visit here for more on IBM and Smarter Transportation.

Navigating The Tech Cosmos @ IBM Software Universe India

I’m well into my third day of a very busy but most enjoyable business trip to Bangalore, my second in as many years.

You’ve read as I’ve written about the crazy traffic, the superb food, the wonderful people, and even an IBM India win vis a vis Escorts Group.

India’s most awaited annual software conclave arrives on October 20th, in Mumbai, in the form of the IBM Software Universe India conference.

Now, it’s time to get down to software business. And what better way than to encourage technology peeps in the sub-continent to consider attending IBM Software Universe India.

The event is scheduled for October 20, 2011, at the Renaissance Convention Centre Hotel in Mumbai. I’m told this is India’s most awaited annual software conference, and a learning ground for IT professionals and developers who want to stay ahead of the technology curve and industry trends.

At the event, attendees can expect to hear about the next big wave in software, and centering around seven unique and diverse tracks: Social Software, Business & Collaboration Solutions, Business Analytics, Application Integration & Optimization, Business Infrastructure, and Security & Risk.

From the optimisation of traffic systems and electric grids, to the delivery of better education, transport and healthcare, to reducing costs with cloud, smarter software is inspiring new thinking and ideas that might be applied to business goals.

Some of the featured speakers and tidings you can expect:

• Keynote from John Dunderdale, VP Growth Markets, IBM, on “Harnessing the Nexg Big Wave”
• A motivating keynote by tennis legend Martina Navratilova
• Sessions by eminent industry leaders and subject matter experts
• A Bollywood Night performance by celebrated singer, Sunidhi Chauhan
• Networking with peers
• Exclusive, on the spot industry certifications

There will also be sneak previews on futuristic technology topics, including Watson, the Spoken Web, Big Data, Social Business, Track & Trace, and others.

For those who might be interested in attending the event, you can find more information and registration information at this website.

You can also find ongoing updates at the IBM Software Universe India blog.

For those of you who are socially inclined, in India and beyond, you can follow the following Twitter ID : @ibmsoftware_in and the conference hashtag: #ibmswuin.

Speaking Of India…

And speaking of India…per my blog post about arriving back in Bangalore over the weekend…IBM recently announced a prominent customer win here just before my arrival.

The Escorts Group, one of India’s leading engineering conglomerates, is adopting IBM’s smarter computing approach to IT which will provide enhanced performance and compliment the company’s business growth goals of lowering its overall IT operating costs.

Through its agreement with IBM, Escorts Group is going to receive a workload-optimized hardware solution to replace its existing ERP infrastructure.

The advanced systems will provide enhanced performance and the new infrastructure will reside in Escorts Group’s newly-built corporate data center. This will manage the company’s disaster recovery system in addition to the ERP system.

The IBM solution is expected to provide Escorts Group with savings in power and cooling costs of between 30 to 35 percent, over a three year period.

“Escorts Group has embarked on a journey of IT transformation to achieve operational & manufacturing excellence,” said Mr. Vipin Kumar, Group CIO, Escorts Limited. “To achieve this we are not only going beyond adhering to prevailing norms, we are in fact setting our own standards and relentlessly pursuing them to achieve our desired benchmarks of excellence.”

“To aid us in this journey we needed a scalable and high-performing IT infrastructure, backed by a robust technology roadmap,” continued Mr. Kumar.  “IBM clearly had the best solution, while ensuring a reduction in our energy footprint and increasing return on investment.”

During the hardware evaluation process to support the expansion, Escorts considered various options including Itanium-based servers from Hewlett-Packard Co. and Oracle Corp.’s Exadata Database Machine.

The company, however, chose to replace its existing HP PA-RISC servers with IBM Power 750 Express and IBM Power 740 Express systems. Each of the systems is complemented by IBM System Storage DS5000s, and IBM Tivoli Storage Manager software.

Click here if you’d like to learn more about IBM’s Power 750 Express system, or here if you’d like to view the demo.

Back In Bangalore

I’m back in Bangalore.

It’s been a little over a year since my first visit, and this time, I knew what I was getting into in terms of the travel.

I calculated that from Austin to India, as the crow flies, it’s a little over 8,000 miles…or was that kilometers??

The Sri Shiva temple in Bangalore is currently under renovation during my visit, but that certainly hasn't stopped hoardes of faithful Hindus paying a visit to Lord Shiva.

In either case, it’s a longgg way on an airplane traveling 500+ MPH. But I found myself eager with anticipation.

Not only in terms of meeting a new team we had put together, but in also seeing the friends I had already met here, and also visiting the vibrant (and now 3rd largest city in India, in terms of population) metropolis that is Bangalore.

The traffic is crazier than ever…there’s still plenty of dust in the streets, not to mention sacred (literally) cows…but I also sense an incredible energy and vibrancy here that has long ago worn off other major cities in the world.

And then there’s the food, which I wish I could just pack into my suitcase and bring back to America.

There’s also the serious business that is cricket (tonight it was the Mumbai Indians against Trinidad & Tobago, playing in the first round of the CLT20…UPDATE: Mumbai won, but just barely…The Trinidadian cricketers didn’t look too happy at breakfast this morning…They were staying at the same hotel as us.), a game I won’t pretend (yet) to fully comprehend but an excitement around which is palpable.

And then, of course, there are the people of India, and the Bangaloreans in particular, whose grace and courtesy and humbleness are unmatched around the globe.

I discovered from a taxi driver on the ride in from the airport here that 3M citizens in 2003 has grown to 9+M in 2011, and though the growth here may have overmatched the infrastructure, it is the chaos and verve and tenacity of its citizenry which suggests a nation that continues on the rise even despite the global gloom and doom headlined in newspapers and websites around the world.

Though my visit this year will be a week shorter, I have a distinct feeling that my learning and understanding will belie my time on the ground, and I’m very much looking forward to the four full days I have left in this week.

As for the content of the meetings and discussions going on here, I cannot relate those due to competitive reasons…the old CIA, “If I told you I’d have to kill ya.”

But rest assured it’s with great anticipation and expectations that we move through the rest of this week.

Beyond that, I’ll have to save the sordid stories for my as-of-yet unpublished memoirs…but know that the memories of my second sojourn to “Bengalaru” being stored in my human RAM will not be erased or forgotten anytime soon.

P.S. I’m blogging on my new portable guerilla platform, an iPod 4 with an Apple bluetooth keyboard. With some luck and some precious spare time, I’ll also hope to share some of what’s being witnessed here in some semblance of video content.

TurboTech: Netflix/Qwikster, HP rumors, Facebook follies, Twitter ads

So Scott and I recorded our latest “TurboTech” episode yesterday, and no sooner did we record the bit about Meg Whitman maybe taking over as CEO of HP than it seems like it’s actually gonna be a done deal.

That’s okay, things move fast in this industry, and it’s kind of like that old joke about how you don’t have to outrun the leopard — you just have to outrun the slowest gazelle.

In this case, I’m not sure if Scott’s the gazelle and I’m the leopard, or if Meg Whitman’s the leopard and Leo Apotheker’s the gazelle, but whatever the case, things change, watch us move your cheese.

We talked about that, the Netflix marketing debacle, and the latest changes on Facebook (which pretty much everyone seems to hate).

Me, I’m off to India tomorrow, and will be hanging in the IT hub of Bangalore for a week.  I hope to take lots of pics and NOT lose my camera there this go around, and am very much looking forward to some of that lovely South and North India Cuisine and to seeing all my IBM India friends.  Put some Kingfishers on ice, gang, I’ll be there momentarily.

Enjoy this episode, and the next dispatch may just be a video one from the streets of Bangalore, where crossing through traffic’s like riding in a sub-contintental rodeo with motor rickshaws and motorbikes!

Yeeee-hawwww, Sahib!

Celebrating Social Media Week: Our Big Blue Social Business

Remember the logo, that curvy red “e” that mimicked the “@” symbol, which came to represent what IBM meant by the idea of “e-business” back in the late 1990s?

Starting in 1997, the IBM e-business logo signaled IBM's focus on helping organizations transform themselves using Internet technologies. It's now helping them pursue similar transformations with "social business" adoption.

Well, imagine replacing it with a curvy “s” instead and calling it “social business” instead, and you’d have a pretty good symbol for describing IBM’s social transformation inside the company, as well as the market it’s helping to make for other companies and organizations around the globe to follow suit.

IBM: The Social Case Study

As we celebrate “Social Media Week,” I wanted to write a post to let people know some details and facts behind IBM’s social transformation. As the largest consumer of social technologies, IBM is a case study for this transformation into a social business.

This goes beyond IBM’s business in social software and services (IBM’s collaboration software, consulting services, analytics/social media research, conducting Jams for clients).  IBM is leading social business on all fronts – technology, policy and practice.

IBM takes social networking seriously —  to develop products and services, to enable sellers to find and stay connected with clients, to train the next generation of leaders, and to build awareness of Smarter Planet among clients, influencers and other communities.

What’s Past Is Social Prologue

IBM’s social media activity dates back to the 1970’s when its mainframe programmers started online discussion forums on the System 370 consoles. For 15 years, IBM employees have used social software to foster collaboration among our dispersed 400,000 person team — long before Generation Y became fixated with social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace.

I remember, because when I joined the company in 1991, I used to collaborate with fellow employees in other locations via IBM’s internal mainframe.

Then, in 1997, IBM recommended that its employees get out onto the Internet, at a time when many companies were seeking to restrict their employees’ Internet access (I’d gotten on the commercial Internet starting in 1993 myself).

In 2005, the company made a strategic decision to embrace the blogosphere and to encourage IBMers to participate (I started this blog in June 2005).

In 2007, IBM launched its own social networking software for the enterprise: IBM  Connections. My team now uses Connections to collaborate and coordinate work literally around the globe. I’m not quite sure how we got along without it (but we used to say the same thing about email!)

This is a screenshot from an IBM Connections Community that I use to manage a workgroup of people who attend a weekly call I've been holding for nearly six years now. The Connections community streamlines the time I have to take to manage basic details for the call, ranging from communicating where files are located to highlighting the call-in number. In short, I'd be lost without it, and be much less productive in my day-to-day work!

In early 2008, IBM introduced social computing guidelines to encompass virtual worlds and sharing of rich media. (Remember Second Life?? Yeah, me neither…well, kind of.)

And later that year, IBM opened its IBM Center for Social Software to help IBM’s global network of researchers collaborate with corporate residents, university students and faculty, creating the industry’s premier incubator for the research, development and testing of social software that is “fit for business”.

Social Business Means Business Change

Here’s a profound stat: According to Gartner, in 2010, only five percent of organizations took advantage of social/collaborative customer action to improve service processes.

IBM sees social media morphing into what we view as a key requirement for “social business” — as tools for organizational productivity and culture change, for engaging with diverse constituencies of clients and experts, and for spurring revenue growth and innovation for our global workforce.

Today, IBM views itself as one of the most prolific users of social networking in the industry with one of the largest corporate-wide communities on social media sites.

Some examples of IBM’s internal social media footprint today include the following:

• 17,000 individual blogs
• 1 million daily page views of internal wikis, internal information storing websites
• 400,000 employee profiles on IBM Connections, IBM’s initial social networking initiative that allows employees to share status updates, collaborate on wikis, blogs and activity, share files
• 15,000,000 downloads of employee-generated videos/podcasts
• 20 million minutes of LotusLive meetings every month with people both inside and outside the organization
• More than 400k Sametime instant messaging users, resulting in 40-50 million instant messages per day

The screen above has become one quite familiar to IBMers around the world. "LotusLive" emeetings have become commonplace, helping employees across multiple geographical locations come together in real-time and virtual space to meet and get work done!

If you were to glance outside IBM on the social media external to the company, you’d find a continued and expansive footprint of IBM participants:

• Over 25,000 IBMers actively tweeting on Twitter and counting
• Approximately 300,00 IBMers on Linkedin. This number is growing at 24%/year, which gives IBM the largest employee presence of any firm on the platform.
• Approximately 198,000 IBMers on Facebook

Putting Social Into Action

Our social business initiatives have had a profound impact on IBM’s business processes and transformation. By way of example, well before the phrases “Web 2.0” or “social media” came into being, IBM was using online jams to drive business initiatives and values development across the company.

As our own CEO Sam Palmisano explained, “Jams have helped change our culture and the fundamental way we collaborate across our business.”  We’ve conducted jams both for IBM and our clients, including the Innovation Jam in 2006 which led directly to the development of the business opportunities that preceded our Smarter Planet agenda.

So, from that perspective, it becomes evident a massive internal social exercise that allowed the employees of IBM identify a major strategic shift for the company!

When’s the last time you let your employee base determine a massive strategic direction that your company was about to take??

Human Resources Are Inherently Social

IBM’s HR hasn’t been untouched by the social business evolution. Our HR professionals use social media for tech-enabled recruiting (think LinkedIn), employee education, sales training and leadership development.

By way of example, IBM relies on social media for leadership development from the first day on the job.  IBM’s Succeeding@IBM makes new hires become part of a social group for the first 6-12 months, so that they can get better acculturated into IBM with other new hires.

In 2006, hundreds of thousands of IBMers came together in a 72-hour virtual jam to help identify the emerging business opportunities that came to represent IBM's "Smarter Planet" initiative. This was "crowdsourcing" of a massive scale, and led to over $100M in internal investments in these important new business opportunities.

In point of fact, IBM’s recent study of 700 Global Chief Human Resource Officers found that  financial outperformers (as measured by EBIDTA) are 57 percent more likely than underperformers to use collaborative and social networking tools to enable global teams to work more effectively together and 21 percent of companies have recently increased the amount they invest in the collaboration tools and analytics despite the economic downturn.

Most recently, we’ve launched an internal initiative entitled “Social Business @ IBM” on our intranet which serves as a resource for IBMers to better educate themselves about social media and various social initiatives taking place internally, while also helping enable them to participate in the broader social media.

We also host modules that provide the IBMer with an introduction to the social web, where they learn how to use social computing tools to foster collaboration, develop networks, and forge closer relationships…with people who are often halfway around the globe!

Social = Transformational

When people tell me they still have to go into an office my response is, “How primitive.”  Don’t get me wrong, I love to press the flesh, but I’ve found that in this flatter earth, increasingly globalized realm, where my colleagues and I have to work all different hours, the question that always comes to me is “Who has time to waste sitting in a car?!!!”

But more importantly, the social business evolution I’ve witnessed at IBM is truly transformational.  When I started work at IBM in the summer of 1991 as a greenhorn intern, we DID go to an office every day and we DID have meetings face to face all the time and I DID wear a white shirt and blue tie.

These days, I can’t remember the last time I went into the IBM office, and yet I feel more connected and more productive than ever.  Why?  Well, I won’t lie, even if I sound like a commercial — the IBM technologies, from our IBM Lotus Sametime Instant Messaging to Lotus Notes and IBM Connections largely remove time and geography from the productivity equation.

But I would suggest there’s an even more transformational thought at work: IBM now trusts its employees in ways it never did before, and the democratization that social tools brought forth has also brought us a democratization in decision-making.

I now make front line decisions that, 20 years ago, would have been driven through a host of hierarchies and managers at a pace that likely would have been acceptable in terms of those times.

Today, such delays would be completely unacceptable and even uncompetitive, as decisions often need to be made instantly. But based on both the technological and cultural transformation within IBM, that’s okay, I’m expected and trusted to make those decisions.

And finally, social business, like social media, is also just plain more fun.

It’s as if these tools enable you to have the whole world at your fingertips.  And that makes for a smarter planet and  a smarter, more competitive IBM.

Solid State, Solid Storage

Solid state has evolved way beyond simply replacing vacuum tubes.

IBM today released the findings of a customer survey that demonstrates pent-up demand for solid state disk technology as a successor to flash and hard disk drives.

Customers are embracing high-performance solid-state disks to support growing data storage demands driven by cloud computing and analytics technologies.

More than half of the customer surveyed (57%) responded that their organization needs to develop a new storage approach to manage future growth. The survey of 250 U.S. IT professionals in decision-making positions was conducted by Zogby International in August 2011 on behalf of IBM.

The survey demonstrates a need for a new class of storage that can expand the market for solid-state drives (SSDs) by combining increased data delivery with lower costs and other benefits.

Nearly half (43 percent) of IT decision makers say they have plans to use SSD technology in the future or are already using it. Speeding delivery of data was the motivation behind 75 percent of respondents who plan to use or already use SSD technology. Those survey respondents who are not currently using SSD said cost was the reason (71 percent).

Anticipating these challenges years ago, IBM Research has been exploring storage-class memory, a new category of data storage and memory devices that can access data significantly faster than hard disk drives — at the same low cost.

Racetrack memory, a solid-state breakthrough technology, is a potential replacement for hard drives and successor to flash in handheld devices. A storage device with no moving parts, it uses the spin of electrons to access and move data to atomically precise locations on nanowires 1,000 times finer than a human hair.

This technique combines the high performance and reliability of flash with the low cost and high capacity of the hard-disk drive. It could allow electronic manufacturers to develop devices that store much more information — as much as a factor of 100 times greater — while using less energy than today’s designs. Racetrack memory is featured as one of IBM’s top 100 achievements as the company celebrates its Centennial this year.

These new storage technologies could also alleviate critical budget, power and space limitations facing IT administrators. Today, an average transaction-driven datacenter uses approximately 1,250 racks of storage, taking up 13,996 square feet and 16,343 kilowatts (kw) of power. By 2020, storage-class memory could enable the same amount of data to fit in one rack that takes up 11 square feet and 5.8 kws of power.

Following are further details from the survey:

• Nearly half (43 percent) say they are concerned about managing Big Data;
• About a third of all respondents (32 percent) say they either plan to switch to more cloud storage in the future or currently use cloud storage;
• Nearly half (48 percent) say they plan on increasing storage investments in the area of virtualization, cloud (26 percent) and flash memory/solid state (24 percent) and analytics (22 percent); and
• More than a third (38 percent) say their organization’s storage needs are growing primarily to drive business value from data. Adhering to government compliance and regulations that require organizations to store more data for longer — sometimes up to a decade — was also a leading factor (29 percent).

You can learn more about IBM Storage technologies here.  Also visit the blog from IBM storage expert and Master Inventor, Tony Pearson, who’s a longtime storage consultant and who writes on storage and storage networking hardware, software and services.

IBM’s Smarter Commerce In The Cloud

I’m still shaking my head over the Netflix debacle.  Apparently so are a lot of the rest of you!

But, I’ll be honest: I’m not giving up on them.  Not yet.  I still like the streaming offering too much and enjoy their deeper catalogue of foreign flicks (but ask me again in the New Year after their Starz deal is set to expire!).

Meantime, IBM is bringing to market a new solution featuring cloud and on-premise offerings that will help organizations respond automatically to shifting consumer and business trends.

These new solutions, Commerce-as-a-Service and Social Media Marketing, combined technology from key acquisitions such as Unica, Coremetrics, and Sterling Commerce with IBM research and development.

These new software solutions are designed to help companies intelligently automate supplier and trading partner interactions, automatically turn marketplace insights into marketing and sales actions and connect online, mobile and social channels to physical stores.

With its Smarter Commerce initiative, IBM is defining and leading a new market that it estimates to be worth $20 billion in software alone.  Smarter Commerce transforms how companies manage and adapt to customer and industry trends such as online, social and mobile shopping and purchasing.

The new offerings introduced today include:

The Commerce-as-a-Service, which accelerates and extends the delivery of Smarter Commerce capabilities with:

• A Cloud-based Configure, Price, Quote offering that simplifies the “quote-to-cash” process by allowing clients to quickly drive new revenue streams by bundling offers automatically.
• A Cross-Channel Selling offering which connects Web store fronts to mobile devices, social networks and other channels. This enables companies to generate new revenue streams by connecting products offered online to in-store purchasing and delivery.  This software is optimized for IBM POWER7 Systems, allowing high-volume retailers to personalize customers’ online shopping experiences, and handle online sales surges during peak shopping seasons without loss of performance. In addition, the systems integrate customer buying information across all sales channels, including online, mobile, in-store, POS and kiosks.
• A Payments & Settlement solution that delivers a highly flexible and secure PCI compliant payment capability at customer checkout.
• A Supplier Integration & Management offering that connects and automates supplier interactions, providing clients with a dashboard view of activity as it happens.
• A Cloud-based File Transfer capability for moving large customer and partner data within and across businesses to support critical commerce needs faster and more efficiently.

Social Media Marketing, which delivers deep analysis of natural language processing of consumer sentiment in social media. This allows customers to receive tailored, one-to-one marketing offers automatically in real time.

IBM has enhanced its cloud-based Digital Marketing Optimization offering by adding a digital data exchange for the tagging, collection and syndication of customer data. IBM is also adding capabilities to more simply analyze multiple enterprise Web sites and speed the ability to optimize email communications and reporting from creation, to deployment, to social sharing.

New Smarter Commerce Consulting Services

IBM today also announced the launch of a new Global Center of Competence for Smarter Commerce.  The new Center of Competence will be part of IBM Global Business Services and is comprised of highly skilled Smarter Commerce consulting experts who will help clients worldwide solve their most complex buying, marketing, selling and servicing business problems.

For more information on IBM Smarter Commerce go here.