IBM Social Business Cloud

Ramsey Pryor, Product Marketing Social Business Cloud, explains IBM's "cloud first" initiative and IBM SmartCloud for Social Business.

Blair Pleasant: Hi, this is Blair Pleasant. I'm in Orlando at IBM Connect. With me is Ramsey Pryor. Ramsey is product marketing social business cloud for IBM Software Group. Welcome, Ramsey.

Ramsey Pryor: Thank you.

Blair: We've been hearing about Cloud First. Tell me what that means and what the goals are.

Ramsey: Cloud First is an initiative that we've announced publically for the first time here at Connect in 2013. What it means is that IBM is orienting itself really to respond to what we're seeing in the market and what our customers are telling us. Which, for a lot of the challenges we see, things like mobile proliferation on all the data that's being generated - cloud is particularly well suited to address a lot of those challenges and a lot of the drivers. Internally, what that means is that in terms of product development, we're delivering capabilities first in the cloud. IBM Docs is a great example of that. That's a capability that we beat the on premises team by just a matter of minutes, but it's significant in the fact that we actually delivered that first in the cloud.

When it comes to actually how we actually talk to the market and talk to our customers, you're going to see a lot more emphasis on our cloud capabilities. People are very familiar with our on-premises capabilities, but they're not often as aware of all of the capabilities that we have in the cloud from Infrastructure-as-a-Service, to Platform-as-a-Service, and Software-as-a-Service.

Blair: So, are we going to see feature parity between premise and cloud solutions?

Ramsey: Yes, that's absolutely a goal of ours. You shouldn't be choosing your deployment model based on a set of capabilities. It's a much more complicated decision than that; and it shouldn't be driven by feature function.

Blair: Tell me about IBM SmartCloud for Social Business - what it includes, a little peek into the roadmap, and what we can expect down the road.

Ramsey: SmartCloud for Social Business - parsing the name of it - SmartCloud is the umbrella brand for all things cloud at IBM. Social Business, when we talk about that, we are talking about taking some of those same capabilities that we have in our personal lives that have been so transformational, and applying that to the way we work. SmartCloud for Social Business is a category. Within that we have a number of offerings that bring together the tools that we use on a daily basis - things like email, instant messaging, file sharing. But we're also infusing those social capabilities. In the same way that I can share information very quickly with my social network, in the business context that means any time that I have new information to share with by business network, it's made instantly available to those people, and that's people not just inside my company.

The great thing about Smart Conference Social Business is it's architected in a way that we can actually bring people outside the company and we recognize those are valuable contributors. So, we bring them into the same fold.

Blair: What are some of the capabilities that are included today and what's going to be added in the next few months?

Ramsey: Our flagship offering is Engage. Engage includes all those capabilities I mentioned: email, file sharing, instant messaging, communities, wikis, online meetings, and then we now have the document editing capabilities that I just mentioned. I think what you're going to see in the future is a lot more in terms of themes; we're really focused on mobile, mobile, mobile. So, you're going to have even more capabilities via mobile devices and that's across all platforms.

We're also going to be focused on improving the user experience. That's really fundamental because it's one thing to have capabilities; it's another thing to really encourage adoption. So IBM is really going to be focused on giving tools that are irresistible to users.

Blair: There are lots of other cloud offerings on the market. What do you see as IBM's differentiation?

Ramsey: The first is that concept that we include everyone you work with, not just people inside your company. We have a free and unlimited guest model. If you're working with an outside agency, partner, or customer you can bring them into the community that you've already formed or the project team or the activity. That's a differentiator. We don't put any limits. It's as simple as adding an email address to bring those people in.

In the way of security, IBM is known for its security. We have decades of experience hosting mission-critical applications for large, large customers. We've applied that to our Software-as-a-Service offerings in the public cloud. In terms of mobility, we don't have a particular browser or platform or device that we're tied to. Customers dictate which devices we need to be on and we support those equally and have an even experience across all platforms.

When it comes to deployment models, it's not just public cloud. We have a solution for every form of cloud computing. So, for customers that need a dedicated cloud, we can provide that. Public cloud we have and then we have a number of customers that want to connect their existing investment to the cloud so we can support hybrid scenarios as well.

Blair: Okay, well thank you very much, and good luck with Cloud First as you go forward.

Ramsey: Thanks a lot. You're welcome.