Posts Tagged 'ibm'



Social networks, meet virtual worlds

If you’re following my twitter it’s easy to understand why my blogging activity during the week is kinda slow – I’m out of the office most of the week, visiting customers, talking to business partners and speaking to analysts – not to mention the KM and Collaboration Event we’re throwing on Sep. 8th !!!
Register now!

My interest with virtual worlds began some 2 years ago, when I read about IBM’s activities in Second Life. Since then I spoke about those initiatives and held some public and internal workshops, trying to explain why IBM care about SL in particular and virtual worlds in general. Since taking Lotus Software sales under my arms I decided to focus on Lotus (big surprise), but still read and subscribe to some VR colleagues, local and international.

Coming Thursday (July 31st) I’ll be at the DiGRA Israel Summer Forum, ‘Where Games and Real Life Meet‘. My friend Dr. Hanan Gazit asked me to participate in a panel called ‘When Videogames, Social Networks and Virtual Worlds Merge‘, alongside Mr. Asi Burak, Mr. Guy Ben-Dov and Attorny Jonathan Klinger.

If you have Thursday evening off, and want to hear about the future of social networks, join us at Holon Institue of Technology. And don’t be a stranger, come and say ‘hi’.. 🙂

Links:
DiGRA Israel Summer Forum (En)
DiGRA Israel Summer Forum (He)
Registration
Holon Institute of Technology
Map

Magic over Lotus – The Ministry of Finance

Spend couple of hours this morning at The Ministry of Finance (MOF), a veteran Lotus customer, with some 1,200 employees spread out mostly in Israel and some in locations worldwide.

Lotus was introduced to the MOF back in 1997 (!), with Lotus Notes 4.5. Since then, dozens of applications were developed, including SMS (text messages), fax server, document manager, scanner, meeting rooms reservation, car pool and many more. Particularly I liked the SMS application: open up a new email, and instead of inserting an email address in the ‘To’ field, you write ‘mobilenumber@SMS’, and Lotus Notes identify the ‘@SMS’ and changes the ‘Text’ field into SMS template. Brilliant !

The MOF is also a green business, paperless office. Their internal document management repository was developed back in 2002, and currently holds over 15GB of data – documents, spreadsheets, presentations, faxes, scanned newspapers and more. Nothing is printed, everything is saved in a Lotus Notes DB and the users can share content easily, across the network.

Brilliant usage of Lotus Notes and Domino. I was trully surprised of what they did.

While on the matter of customer successes, here’s an event worth writing down.
Mark your calendars for Monday, September 8th: KM and Collaboration User Forum, where IBM customers will present some of the work they’re doing over our Software solutions. The IT manager of MOF is already in the speakers list.

Links:
Ministry of Finance, Israel
IBM Software for a Greener World
KM and Collaboration User Forum – Monday, Sep. 8th, IBM Israel HQ

2Q Results: Lotus Software revenues up 21%

Yes folks, it’s that time of the month, when the corporate giants are reporting 2Q earnings.
IBM (IBM) just reported its results, with total revenues of $26.8B, up 13%, with EPS beating the market by 28%, to $1.98.

The quarter in numbers:
Total revenues of $26.8B, up 13% Y/Y;
Software revenues of $5.6B, up 17%;
Lotus Software revenues increased by a whopping 21% Y/Y !

The rest is available at the official press release, at Yahoo! Finance or at the nearest Google.

And final thanks to seekingalpha.com, for consolidating all the info into one spot.

My BFF*, Alan Lepofsky

My close friend and colleague, Alan Lepofsky, announced on his blog that he is leaving IBM and taking the position of Director of Marketing at SocialText, alongside Ross Mayfield. Wow!

Alan has been in Lotus since it was, well, Lotus, back in 1993. Lotus (and later IBM) is the only company he knows. For the past several years Alan has been the senior evangelist dude for Lotus Collaboration strategy, and if you happen to get an email from him, IBM email, his title is ‘Lotus StrategizR’ – COOL.


I came to know Alan some 2 and a half years ago, in my previous role, when I started to get into social media and collaboration, within IBM. Alan was the top result on every internal search I did, and the relationship began. Upon moving to Lotus Software I often quoted his posts and opinions, and he really helped me understand faster what Lotus Collaboration is all about.

The highlight of our (ongoing) relationship had to be LCTY Israel, back in March 2008, where Alan was keynote speaker. His time in Israel was well spent, business and personal, and it was a blast hanging out with him, touring Jerusalem for a day, IBM Party, visiting Haifa Research Labs and hearing him speak. Even thou his keynote was way longer then scheduled, no one said anything – they were hypnotized by his passion, dedication and belief in Lotus, and its collaboration benefits.
Pictured here, outside IBM Haifa Research Labs, you can see some of his enthusiasm – Yellow long-sleeved short (in the Israeli climate), smiling as always, after hearing what IBM researchers are working on in the collaboration space.

Alan, it was an honor and a pleasure working with you in Big Blue, and I wish you all the best as the new marketing chief for Socialtext.

* definition of BFF

E2.0?! Can you start from Web 1.0 please?

Today I had the privilege of speaking at a management workshop of one of the largest banks in Israel. The workshop was held at the bank’s education center, 30min outside of Tel Aviv, with a beautiful view of the ocean. This was one of the cases that I came to lecture through the community. The management workshop was given by an outside consulting company, that heard me speak at a recent conference. Another proof of the power of social media.

I was told to present ‘the IBM story’ of E2.0 adoption (Web 2.0 goes to work), meaning what we’re doing, internally, to foster knowledge sharing and participation. I took couple of my presentations, consolidated slides, made some adjustments, added the IBM angle, and I was ready to go.

The population was mixed in age, all in managerial positions at the bank, youngest one in the room was me 🙂 Only when I asked people if they knew what twitter is, I realized that most people had no idea what Web 2.0 is all about, not to mention E2.0. That’s when I decided to skip some slides and explain over a whiteboard what we’re talking about…

I won’t tell the entire 90min presentation here, only summize with this:
At the beginning of my presentation a lady asked me what’s the benefit in all that user generated content (blogs, comments, wikis, articles, etc) if most of them are garbage (or below average), and why should any organization consider adopting such tools. At the end of the presentation, she asked me what’s the top 7 blogs to follow. And she’s also the one responsible for the title of this post. Folks, change is possible! even in a ‘traditional’ business as a bank.

As for the slides: I had to make some ad-hoc changes during the workshop, so the slides will be posted later this week.

BTW – if you haven’t subscribed to Jeremiah Owyang by now, shame on you!
His posts are right on the mark, and his knowledge in social media is infinite!
Only today we were talking at the workshop about FSS examples for social media (ROI/VOI), and there’s a list availble. We also talked about Gen Y and why they care if a bank has IM or a facebook thing, and here’s another post.
Subscribe. Now.

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Mobile & Media Consultant. I help startup companies launch products to the consumer market. Reach out: dvir.reznik [at] gmail.com
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This is my personal blog. The postings here do not represent the thoughts, intentions, plans or strategies of my past employers or of my clients. It is solely my opinion.