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By Bethann Cregg, Vice President for IBM Social Business Cloud
What’s the one thing all organizations have in common? They must identify new ways to grow revenue and expand their business to stay competitive.
Increasingly, organizations are using cloud computing and social networking to help them embrace new market opportunities.
Over the past several years cloud computing has matured to a point where it’s considered a mainstream technology service. The benefits can seem endless. It helps to reduce IT costs, it’s easy to set up, scales to your business’ storage needs seamlessly, provides customers, partners and employees with remote access from anywhere at anytime, it’s secure and security-rich. Expected to grow to more than $214 billion by 2020, cloud computing has become a catalyst for capturing new business value. Continue Reading »
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By Andras Szakal
IBM US Federal CTO
A smarter government is more agile, more able to effectively respond to changing government needs and citizen dynamics. One of the best ways to improve the way our government works – both its operational efficiency as well as the services it provides to citizens – is through cloud computing.
Yesterday I participated in the Congressional High-Tech Caucus Cloud Task Force’s “Cloud Computing: A Primer” in Washington, DC as part of an industry panel which tackled issues critical to cloud utilization. The event was designed to help our legislators understand how to optimize IT and lower costs, reducing government waste. I was excited to be able to take this message to Congress, and appreciated the opportunity to join Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX) and Rep. Doris Matsui (D-CA), co-chairs of the High Tech Caucus.
As citizens, there is a lot of reason to be excited about the promise of cloud computing to help our government operate more efficiently. We like to feel that our tax dollars are hard at work, and that maximum value is being squeezed out of every penny. Rapidly evolving advancements in cloud technologies in such areas as resource pooling, virtualization and operational automation must be considered to help transform and consolidate government data centers to ensure more effective use of resources and lower operational costs.
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“The secret of getting ahead is getting started.” Mark Twain
Today, IBM announced the 33 cities that will participate this year in its Smarter Cities Challenge grant program. This marks the second year in a three-year, $50 million, 100-city initiative. IBM sends five- or six-person teams of experts in a range of disciplines to help cities formulate strategies for improving the quality of life for their citizens.
By now, IBM has amassed a wealth of knowledge about how to help cities get started on transformational projects. Last year, the company engaged with 25 cities around the world, including St. Louis in the United States, Glasgow in the United Kingdom, Chiang Mai in Thailand and Johannesburg in South Africa. The previous year, they ran test programs in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam; Katowice, Poland; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Chengdu, China; and elsewhere. The themes of the projects ranged from education, transportation and to public safety to energy and sustainable economic development. Here’s a post on the Citizen IBM blog from Stephen Mandel, the mayor of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, about the engagement there.
After each engagement, IBM’s Corporate Citizenship team identifies lessons learned. The exercise is partly aimed at improving the program itself, but the team also gleans insights that could help any leader in any city launch an initiative aimed at fundamentally transforming an aspect of how the city works. Here are some of the most critical lessons for leaders:
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by Jebb Dykstra, CEO of Meetrix, an IBM Premier Business Partner
It used to be that a person with his head in the clouds had unrealistic and impractical ideas.
Today, thanks to cloud computing, that’s where many employees of small and midsize companies have their best ideas.
Collaboration through the cloud can unlock doors and spur the innovation necessary for companies to stay competitive today. It’s no wonder that a recent IBM midmarket study shows that 70 percent of the business and IT decision makers who participated have collaboration solutions planned or under way — and 66 percent have cloud computing projects in progress. According to AMI Partners, SMBs in the United States will spend more than $49 billion on cloud services in 2015, nearly double the size of the market today. Cloud services are good investments because of the cost savings, flexibility, and speed to market they offer.
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by Katie Keating, IBM Cloud Social Business Manager
Here at IBM, we have a pretty large population of thinkers—more than 426,000 thinkers around the globe, in fact. That’s a lot of thoughts flying around.
In order to harness some of those thoughts, we’ve implemented a number of social elements in the way we do business. Today I want to share one of our latest social endeavors—a collaboration of some of our brightest thinkers in cloud computing: ThoughtsonCloud.com. Continue Reading »
