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.