IBM Acquires Vivant Digital Business in Australia

IBM today announced its intention to acquire Vivant Digital business (Vivant), a boutique digital and innovation agency based here. This acquisition extends the strategy and design expertise of IBM iX, one of the world’s largest digital agencies and global business design partners, with Vivant talent and expertise to accelerate clients’ digital transformations.

The CEO and founder of Vivant, Anthony Farah, will also take the role of Digital Strategy & iX Leader for IBM Australia and New Zealand.

With close to a decade of innovation consultancy experience, Vivant has established a strong reputation for its design philosophy and innovative approach, using insights from behavioral science, data and technology for Australian start-ups and corporates, primarily in the financial services and distribution industries.

Together IBM iX and Vivant, based in Sydney and Melbourne, will address the growing need of clients seeking transformation though innovative digital business models and bold customer experiences.

This adds to IBM acquisitions made during 2016 as it rapidly expands its iX global capabilities in strategic ways to better serve clients. From strategy and design to scalable digital, commerce and mobile, IBM iX’s team of specialists work side-by-side with clients across more than 36 global IBM Studios. Working at the intersection of strategy, creativity and technology, IBM iX helps clients digitally reinvent their businesses.

The acquisition is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2017, subject to applicable regulatory review and customary closing conditions. Financial details were not disclosed.

Within Cooee

My sympathies go out to my amigos in Australia (and to my expat Aussie friends scattered around the globe).

Believe it or not, a few of we U.S. Americans were watching to see what the outcome of your election would be, and wouldn’t you know it, your razor close election seems to have been fashioned like that of the recent election in the U.K.

I hope your deadlock ends soon and somebody figures out who’s in charge.

Meanwhile, I wanted to report on another story from our friends down under involving the use of Lotus social software.

Though it won’t necessarily solve any of your election woes, just last week IBM did announce that the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) is adopting IBM social software to support the way thousands of employees connect and interact.

To help them, in Australian slang, to be more “within cooee” (within earshot).

We’ve seen from our own CEO study that 98 percent of CEOs say they need to restructure the way their organizations work.

5.3 hours per week per employee are wasted due to inefficient processes (remember those TPS reports from the movie, “Office Space”?), and two hours per day per employee is spent looking for the right information and expertise within an organization.

That’s where social software comes into play. Social software can help alleviate this problem because it helps keep global work teams better connected and more able to deliver results.

ABS  is planning to use  IBM Lotus Connections throughout its 3,200 person organization, and will extend social software to all of its employees across Australia.

And considering what a big place Australia is, that’s probably a good thing.

“ABS prides itself on a history of adopting cutting-edge software to bring speed and effectiveness to our organization,” said Dale Chatwin, Director, Knowledge Management Initiative, ABS. “With Lotus Connections, ABS can use business-grade social software, straight out of the box.”

Since 1992, the ABS has used IBM Lotus software to empower its employees to connect, collaborate and innovate while optimizing the way they work.

Recently, ABS was recognized in the Gershon review for its best practice use of the Lotus platform in supporting the ABS’ advanced knowledge management environment.

The environment delivers ongoing information productivity and facilitates collaboration through the integration of  portal, collaboration, mail, workflow, offline capabilities, document management and record keeping.

IBM Lotus Connections complements and extends existing collaboration environments by featuring the latest internet advances like blogs, wikis, secure file sharing, profiling and tagging capabilities, task management, and community spaces, along with email, chat and social data components.

By coupling its existing IBM Lotus Notes environment with IBM Lotus Connections, the ABS can introduce an integrated Web 2.0 social software platform utilizing the best features of each product.

In adopting Lotus Connections technology, the ABS is in very good company. Over 35% of Fortune 100 companies have also adopted IBM’s social software offerings.

And as I’ve mentioned in this blog in the past, we sip our own champagne at IBM, using Lotus Connections to manage our own farflung efforts around the globe.

Lotus Connections is particularly helpful to me for helping communicate and share resources with teams in different time zones.

As I like to say, while it continues working, I continue sleeping.

Back in July, IBM was announced as the worldwide market leader in the social platform software space by IDC.  You can read more about that here.

Up and Down

It’s great to be back on American soil, but hard to leave the Asia Pacific region, as always.  So much going on there, and so little time to take it all in.

Over the weekend, I had an opportunity to see a little more of Sydney before heading back east, including the Sydney Taronga Zoo (best zoo I’ve ever experienced!) and an Australian Rules Football match between the Sydney Swans and the Brisbane Lions at the Sydney Cricket Stadium.

As a clueless American, I wasn’t sure what was going on on the field when the game first started, but by halftime I’d figured out the scoring, which is always a good sign, and the Swans took the Lions 107-87, with former Lions player Daniel Bradshaw booting six goals on the win.

That dude could kick some Australian football.

As for the ride home, it was a lot shorter coming this way…20 hours, no problemo! 

And I arrived just in time to catch the initial flow of news emerging from IBM’s Impact event in Las Vegas this week, where I’m told there are already over 6,000 IBM customer, partners, and other vested constituents on the ground ready for action.

This morning’s Impact keynote will be streamed live here, and you’ll be able to follow all the key announcements here.

You can also see a continuing stream of information from Impact at the new Impact social media aggregator.

If you’re following along on Twitter, the conference hashtag is #ibmimpact

Nano Land Down Under

I arrived in Sydney earlier today (Tuesday) with my merry band of IBM traveling colleagues.

We landed around 5:15 AM Sydney time, then promptly headed into town to grab a catnap.  As much as I tried to sleep on the flight from Singapore to Sydney, I was stuck in a middle seat bulkhead in coach class, and so sleep was cheap.

Thanks again to our colleagues in Singapore.  Our time together was brief but informative, and I look forward to returning there someday soon.

As to the Land Down Under, it’s my first visit here, but having seen a bit of Sydney now, it certainly won’t be my last.  The Sydney Harbour view is breathtaking, and yes, I saw the Opera House (it’s kind of hard to miss being right down the street from our hotel).

No bunyip sightings as of yet, but the week’s just getting started.

Even as I worked hard at getting small in my Qantas seat overnight, IBM scientists have been busy getting jiggy with their nanotechnology.

In fact, they’ve been so busy they created a 3D map of the earth so small recently that 1,000 of them could fit on one grain of salt!

They were able to accomplish this through a new, breakthrough technique that uses a tiny silicon tip with a sharp apex — 100,000 times smaller than a sharpened pencil — to create patterns and structures as small as 15 nanometers at greatly reduced cost and complexity.

This patterning technique opens new prospects for developing nanosized objects in fields such as electronics, future chip technology, medicine, life sciences, and optoelectronics.

To demonstrate the technique’s unique capability, the team created several 3D and 2D patterns, using different materials for each one as reported in the scientific journals Science and Advanced Materials:

• A 25-nanometer-high 3D replica of the Matterhorn, a famous Alpine mountain that soars 4,478 m (14,692 ft) high, was created in molecular glass, representing a scale of 1:5 billion.**
• Complete 3D map of the world measuring only 22 by 11 micrometers was “written” on a polymer. At this size, 1,000 world maps could fit on a grain of salt. In the relief, one thousand meters of altitude correspond to roughly eight nanometers (nm). It is composed of 500,000 pixels, each measuring 20 nm2, and was created in only 2 minutes and 23 seconds.
• 2D nano-sized IBM logo was etched 400-nm-deep into silicon, demonstrating the viability of the technique for typical nanofabrication applications.
• 2D high-resolution 15-nm dense line patterning.

You can learn more about this fascinating new development by watching the following video, which interviews several of the scientists involved in the effort.

Blue Kangaroo

I’m getting ready for a very long plane ride.

I’m heading over to Singpapore and Australia with some colleagues to meet up with some other colleagues manana.

We’ll be talking all things digital, and I’ll be traveling with my newfound lightweight laptop ThinkPad X200s.

The X200s is my new work-issued computer. Although it feels a little primitive returning to a machine with WindowsXP after using machines with Ubuntu Linux and Mac OS X, I have to say the whole weight tradeoff is worth the exchange.

The X200s is more than a netbook, but less than a full laptop.  Having less weight also meant less processor performance — it’s not the fastest computer I’ve ever had by a long stretch.  But, I added 1 extra GB of RAM and it does the job just fine.

Now if I only had an airplane adapter for the 20+ hour ride to Singapore!

That’s okay, it’ll give me plenty of time to try and digest the wealth of news coming out of Facebook’s f8 developer conference this week.

Question: Does Mark Zuckerberg want to take over the Interwebs as we know it?

Answer: Uh, duh.

The ever reliable Scobleizer goes long on explaining what the FB is up to in its quest for global digital domination.

Uh, and you thought you didn’t understand those privacy controls on Facebook before?

Good frickin’ luck figuring them out as they expand their tentacles onto the Facebook API info superhighway.

Me, I’m just hoping to see a kangaroo.