ARMONK, N.Y., March 22, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced it is extending its social business platform with the industry's first fully integrated social email solution.  The move aims to simplify and accelerate social business adoption in the marketplace, providing employees with a single access point to all of their collaboration tools -- social media, email, group activities, blogs and more. 

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For more than 20 years IBM has been delivering leading products that connect people to people and people to information. Available through a wide choice of deployment options including on premises, in the IBM SmartCloud, hybrid or on popular mobile devices, IBM Notes and Domino Social Edition 9 now gives front line business employees across marketing, development, human resource and more a single access point for all of their social collaboration tools. As a result they are able to improve workforce productivity and speed innovation. 

According to an IBM study, 82 percent of chief marketing officers (CMO) plan to increase their use of social media over the next three to five years. IBM's 2012 CEO Study identified the same trend -- while today only 16 percent of CEOs are using social business platforms to connect with customers, that number is poised to spike to 57 percent within the next three to five years.

As social adoption grows, organizations must use these technologies to transform their culture and drive innovation globally. Email is a critical component of this evolution. According to Osterman Research, each day 116 billion emails are sent and received by an estimated 800 million workers. When compared to Facebook and Twitter, which have reported 2.5 billion items shared[1] and 400 million tweets a day[2] respectively, it is clear that email remains the dominant communication application in the workplace. However, in this social business age, email can no longer exist on an island.

Named the Enterprise Social Software leader by IDC for three consecutive years, IBM today extends its social business leadership by bringing messaging into the social experience, turning email from a client application used only for mail to a core component of a platform that drives knowledge sharing, workforce productivity and overall business value.

For example, through a single interface an employee who is working on a new marketing project can check email as well as activity streams containing the latest work from each team member, share files with colleagues, view new blogs on topics relevant to the subject and more. In addition, since the service includes the industry's broadest device platform support, each team member has access to the same content all through their mobile device of choice, whether it's an iPhone, Android device, Windows Phone or the new BlackBerry 10.

As for those companies using Microsoft Outlook, IBM also provides a new social connector for Outlook and integration with Microsoft Exchange. Through this connector IBM is able to bring the capabilities of shared files, communities and other key social capabilities directly into the Outlook client to ensure social email can be a reality for virtually any business.

Today more than 50 percent of the Fortune 500 have licensed IBM's social software. IBM is also a leader in the mid-market collaboration space where it works with companies such as Celina Insurance.

"For Celina, being a social business has allowed our team to engage clients and agents so we can build better insurance products. IBM has been at the center of our social transformation," said Rob Shoenfelt, senior vice president and CIO, Celina Insurance. "By integrating messaging into our overall social business offering we have access to powerful new capabilities that let us tap into the collective wisdom of our team and ensure our ability to deliver customers the level of service they demand."

"We're very excited about IBM's new social offering. The ability to integrate our critical business processes directly into our email platform can allow users to be more productive in the one tool where they spend a majority of their day." said John Roling, director of IT at Czarnowski. "Today our customers do not think email is dead. In fact it's still their preferred way for communicating with us. Now by bridging email with social applications our team can be more connected and productive than ever."

IBM Notes and Domino are available on premises as well as through IBM SmartCloud where customers such as Brunswick Corporation are using it to provide their 8,000 users with cloud-based feature-rich email.

"Having a fully connected workforce is essential to our success. However, the explosion of new mobile devices was making it increasingly difficult for our teams to stay plugged in," said Greg Neveau, director technology architecture, Brunswick Corporation. "With IBM Smart Cloud, we aren't just giving employees access to email, but rather a comprehensive on-the-go social experience that keeps them connected to each other and to the information needed to ensure our ongoing success."

The IBM social business platform features a complete set of capabilities including enterprise-grade social networking, social analytics, and social content management in a seamless, unified experience across a myriad of business applications. For more information about IBM's social business initiative and creating a smarter workforce, please visit http://www.ibm.com/press/socialbusiness or follow #Socbiz on Twitter.

Media Contacts:
Doug Fraim
IBM Media Relations
(617) 501-6376
dfraim@us.ibm.com

[1] GigaOM: "Facebook is collecting your data -- 500 terabytes a day"

[2] CNET: "Twitter hits 400 million tweets per day, mostly mobile"

SOURCE IBM