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Posted by
Steve Hamm in
To vote for this as the coolest IBM 5 in 5 prediction, click the “Like” button below.
Read an in-depth blog post by IBM Research about the technology underlying the prediction.
Join the Twitter conversation at #IBM5in5
Today’s shoppers are smarter, better connected, and more empowered than ever before. They want to do business with retailers on their own terms — when, where and how they chose. Using mobile devices. Through social networks. And via new digital venues.
To see smarter commerce at work, you only have to observe the holiday shopping rush that took place on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. A record number of consumers focused on finding the best online deals using social networks and mobile devices; while the big retail winners were those that delivered compelling, relevant deals that people could easily access from their channel of choice. This is based on findings from IBM’s fourth annual Cyber Monday Benchmark, which tracks more than a million transactions a day, analyzing terabytes of raw data from 500 retailers around the country.
Click on the images below for a larger view, or here for the entire set:
Every day, companies make bet-the-business decisions about their customers, competitors, new products and even their own reputation based on account balances, delivery schedules, profit margins, customer feedback and more – and most do it with crossed fingers.
That’s because they know that decision-making today is an art based on incomplete and conflicting information, and that hunches play a big role in determining which way to go.
Now imagine a company that could look at all of its information at once; Spot hidden trends before they occur; Glean insights into customer sentiment from data in a wide variety of formats; And keep up with consumer conversations and opinions moving at the speed of the Web.
Click on the images for a larger view:
Information is flowing like mighty rivers from a trillion intelligent devices, sensors, social forums and all manner of instrumented objects. This “big data” comes in one size: large; and in many different varieties. And with 80 percent of new data growth existing as unstructured content — from medical files, to 3D images, to email keystrokes, to Twitter tags — the challenge is trying to pull it all together and make sense of it.
But what if you could tap into this information to uncover lucrative business opportunities? What if you had the “inside information” you needed to retain customers or improve research? What if you could inject certainty and predictability into the decision-making process?
Participants at this week’s Information on Demand and Business Analytics Forum in Las Vegas are asking these questions, and they’re finding highly intelligent and profitable answers in clever analytics software that can organize, store and mine all of the information scattered throughout their organization and provide customized intelligence to gain faster insight from this information.
And there’s now little in the world of a smarter planet that analytics doesn’t cover (click on the images for a larger view):
| Consumer Sentiment | Commerce | Security |
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Posted by
Chris Luongo in
One of the discussions heard at last week’s Smarter Commerce Summit in San Diego, CA centered on a power shift from sellers to buyers that is redefining the term “commerce.”
Retailers were the first to face the rising power of consumers, but now leaders in every industry are serving the connected customer’s needs at every turn — through dynamic business networks that span human, digital, social and mobile modes.
Click on the images for a larger view:
Posted by
Chris Luongo in
Every day, companies make bet-the-business decisions about their customers, new products and even their own reputation based on account balances, delivery schedules, profit margins, and more — and most do it with crossed fingers. That’s because they know that decision making today is an art based on incomplete and conflicting information, and that hunches play a big role in determining which way to go.
Now imagine a company that could look at all of its information at once. Spot hidden trends before they occur. Target marketing of products across multiple channels to drive sales. And analyze vast amounts of customer data and insight, and feed it into every point in the process — from design to distribution.
We’re now in the age of “Smarter Commerce“. And below are examples of companies that are showing the way (click on the images for a larger view).
At its first Smarter Commerce Global Summit this week in San Diego, CA, IBM is announcing new software and services that address a broad spectrum of enterprise commerce activities — new ways to buy, sell and secure greater customer loyalty in the era of mobile and social networks
Here’s a simple picture story on the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of Smarter Commerce. Click on the image for a larger view:
See also:
How it Works: Smarter Commerce (an illustrated video)
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Posted by
Jack Mason in
A little more than a year ago, our small Strategic Programs group in IBM Global Business Services (GBS) started experimenting with a new kind of conversational webcast, a live panel discussion that brought an IBM thought leader together with other subject matter experts via webcams, and enabled viewers to be an integral part of the discussion via Facebook and Twitter.
Last week, we streamed our latest episode, which focused on the future of mobile commerce. Because it represents one of the best examples of what we’re trying to do, I wanted to share it here and describe a little about the strategic thinking behind our virtual discussions, or vPanels. You can browse the full library of past vPanels via this Bitly Bundle. And you can subscribe to the series via RSS.
Mobile Commerce: The Decade Ahead
Posted by
Steve Hamm in
Every tech company attempts to sell potential customers on the promise that its products and services will deliver a superior return on the customer’s investment dollars. That’s not a particularly difficult task when you’re talking about traditional IT investments, which seek to improve the efficiency and productivity of the IT function itself. But it’s harder when the purpose of the investment is to boost the performance of an entire business, including placing a value on the benefits received by the customers’ customers. Such is the challenge facing IBM when it hawks its Smarter Planet solutions.
A year ago, IBM’s leaders commissioned the IBM Center for Applied Insights, an internal research group, to come up with a way of presenting the whole array of gains from Smarter Planet projects by focusing on vertical industries. The group created a new methodology for gathering and analyzing pertinent information and placing dollar values both on the components of a project and on the entire effort. The initiative, called “ROI for Smart,” has resulted in series of reports analyzing the returns for specific projects in eight industries. Steve Rogers, the director of the Center, says that unlike other approaches in the tech industry, “this is not about measuring the ROI of IBM’s products and services; it’s measuring the ROI of pursuing a Smarter Planet path and achieving higher levels of business competency.”
As a reporter covering the enterprise technology industry for two decades, I was deeply skeptical whenever tech vendors claimed that they had come up with their own assessments of the value they could create for customers. I still am. But I’m also impressed with the results that Rogers and his team have come up with.
You can decide for yourself if their analysis is credible by reading the reports:
Healthcare: Capturing Value from Patient Centered Care.
Retail: The Value of Smarter Merchandising.
Electronics: The Road to Customer Intimacy.
Banking: The Value of Credit Risk Management.
Transportation: The Value of Customer Centric Sales & Services.
Government: The Value of Smarter Social Services.
Telecom: Smarter Communications Through Analytics.
Chemicals and Petroleum: The Value of Smarter Oil and Gas Fields.
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This is the third in a series of three essays about the potential payoff from applying Smarter Planet thinking to businesses. The first two essays can be found here and here.
