Web 2.0 Goes to Work for Business

IT leaders

Web 2.0 unleashes creativity, knowledge and responsiveness for IT

Today's IT departments are under enormous pressure to give business users access to information on demand, including text, audio/video and Web. They must prioritize enterprise-wide issues ahead of the needs of individual departments and end users. This balancing act frequently leads to frustration and missed opportunities, and causes increasingly tech-savvy business users to embrace new, simpler technologies, in some cases bypassing central IT departments.

IBM provides the kind of Web 2.0 leadership and experience that the most demanding IT teams want to partner with to unleash the creativity, knowledge and responsiveness within their organizations. IBM helps IT deliver dramatic improvements in individual and team effectiveness, productivity and cost savings across employees, customers, suppliers, and partners.

A Web 2.0 vision that delivers value to IT organizations today

The IBM Web 2.0 vision is built on three main tenants, all of which enable the Power of Participation. They are People (Social Computing), Platform (Web as a platform) and Enabling Technologies.

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Social Computing from IBM is focused on enabling people to connect, collaborate and innovate. More simply, it enables your teams to capture and preserve the collective knowledge and expertise of the entire value chain—across geographic boundaries. This can help create a more collaborative and dynamic company culture that fosters innovation.

Today's businesses need to recognize that a younger, more technology-savvy generation of people (referred to as 'Generation Y') comprise about 25% of the workforce today and will make up about 47% of the workforce by 2014. This is the generation of people who have grown up with the latest technologies and who have become highly adaptable and interactive. As the Gen Y'ers become a larger population in the workforce, companies will increasingly benefit from adapting and supporting social computing technologies.

Learn more about social computing for business.

Next, our view of the Web as a Delivery Platform erases boundaries and extends the value networks. This part of our vision offers the advantage of economies of scale, lowering the barrier of entry and associated up-front costs. Using the Web as a platform, businesses can more easily capture user created content and participation value along with more effective use of information. Web as a delivery platform promotes a globally integrated virtual enterprise, extending the discovery and use of expertise across an entire ecosystem.

IBM has announced "Bluehouse", code name for a future software as a service (SaaS) solutions Web platform designed for companies with five to 500 employees and with limited or no in-house technical resources. Bluehouse will provide smaller businesses extranet collaboration services for open social networking, instant messaging, file sharing, project management and web conferencing.

Learn more about Web as a delivery platform for business.

Enabling Technology is the next tenant of our Web 2.0 vision. Web 2.0 technologies from IBM are focused on making applications simple to build, quick to remix and easy to extend. And so we have changed the economics of application development by delivering development tools that satisfy the needs of a range of skill levels. This approach enables businesses to leverage existing in-house talent, enterprise information and data easily and to build targeted applications to smaller audiences more rapidly and with lower costs. And now, even your line-of-business people can build focused applications without requiring IT assistance.

Learn more about enabling technologies.

What customers, analysts and press are saying:

As an IT leader who is considering Web 2.0 technologies for the first time or looking to extend your IT environment with greater benefits, the IBM Web 2.0 software portfolio and our professional services teams are ready to help. See what customers, press and analysts are saying about our vision/strategy and recent announcements and how our thought leadership in Web 2.0 is earning the highest marks from all audiences. Then click through to our Web 2.0 portfolio sections for deeper insight to learn how our Web 2.0 products and technologies can help your IT organization to improve enterprise productivity, collaboration and innovation, and to drive measurable business results.

By using tools such as Lotus Quickr internally and with our clients, Trovus lives and breathes the strategies it was founded on to demonstrate a concrete example of the business benefits possible with Web 2.0." - Jon Mell, Sales and Marketing Director, Trovus – Sept 29, 2008 Read more

"Intuit's growth has always been driven by innovative products. We wanted to take that to the next level by tapping the collective intelligence of the organization using a Web 2.0 approach. IBM Lotus Connections is proving to be the right suite of social software for our business. It allows us to quickly find specific skills across the company, share expertise and execute faster." — Charles Salmon, IT Director - Intuit

"The point is that IBM's mashup products aren't from a skunk works operation, but arising from something very close to the heart of IBM, its enterprise IT client base. Mashups arise from client needs, in a way from the bottom up, which for once IBM feels it can satisfy and still play to some of its strengths: data management, IT security and governance, open source tools. Is this an IBM 2.0?" Intelligent Enterprise - "IBM Takes a Lead in the Mashup Fray" - May 16, 2008