At the recent Impact 2013 conference, IBM categorized a new class of systems of interaction bringing together systems of record (transactional, service-oriented), systems of engagement (interaction-oriented, context-aware) and the Internet of Things (embedded devices, sensor-driven).

Cloud solutions require a strong integration infrastructure to combine on- and off-premises Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications. Recognizing the critical importance of this point, IBM acquired Cast Iron in 2010 to complement the acquisition of DataPower in 2005, a combination which has aided the delivery of integration capabilities in high demand by customers. With the continuing growth of mobile devices such as smart phones and an expanding multitude of smart sensors (like RFID tags), security and scalability are crucial to a reliable solution. Accordingly, IBM announced:

IBM API Management:
The API (application programming interface) economy is too important for any vendor to ignore. Multiple born-on-the-web companies like Facebook, LinkedIn, Amazon, Twitter and eBay are setting the trend of building ecosystems by providing API access. Managing interactions with customers, vendors and channel partners opens opportunities for new sources of revenue and is rapidly becoming a required capability for enterprises to offer. According to IBM, this new solution will help organizations securely create, manage and socialize APIs, helping extend their products and services to various mobile channels. Interestingly, IBM is not the only vendor jumping into this market or expanding their API Management capabilities. Recently, Intel purchased Mashery, CA Technologies acquired Layer 7 and Mulesoft bought Programmable Web from Alcatel-Lucent. The good news for customers is that there will be competition and multiple options for supporting their API Management efforts.

IBM MessageSight:
According to a study by IDC, smart phone sales topped other mobile phones in the first quarter of this year. At the same time, AT&T began offering customers home security and automation services. These developments and similar trends contribute to the phenomenal growth of data from mobile devices and sensors. At the same time, the events generated from these sources need to be processed in real time to deliver actionable results. To handle the need to process millions of transactions per second, IBM’s answer is to package the solution in an appliance called MessageSight, giving the capability to deliver a product using low power consumption. Special purpose appliances give customers a more simple way to handle transaction growth.

Better Automation:
While the needs of business to manage transaction and data growth are rapidly growing, there is a crucial need for programmable infrastructure to handle the deluge of services made available and the foundation of compute, storage & network resources. Beyond core infrastructure components, the IBM PureApplication System was enhanced to better handle disaster recovery, security and scalability while simplifying cloud deployments.

With many enterprise customers using Windows-based applications, it was not surprising that the IBM PureApplication System now supports Microsoft Sharepoint and SQL Server. Through automation, these systems could significantly reduce the need for services in outsourced contracts or effort needed by an in-house IT staff. When long term outsourced contracts come up for renewal, customers can benefit by looking at the underlying technology used by their vendors to automate regular tasks and reduce labor. At the same time, customers should continuously monitor new capabilities available from IT product vendors.

IBM’s focus on better integration reflects changing customer requirements that also complement the additional demands placed on enterprise IT infrastructure by new workloads. Delivering a higher order of services in a programmatic way through automation is the only way to address the geometric growth of IT resources.

Large enterprises will choose vendors who help simplify the transition to and management of the new landscape. Business partners will evaluate technology from vendors to build managed services to meet expectations of their customers. After reviewing the Impact 2013 announcements, IBM seems to be recognizing the significant change in customer needs and responding with solutions designed to address them.

While customers choose managed service providers, customers want to ensure that the services they engage not only provide them with the services they need at the right cost but also that the services meet their business needs. This leads to challenges for MSPs to meet these expectations.  In a previous post, I wrote about the role of MSPs in the new IT landscape. In this post, I will address common issues facing MSPs when crafting strategies:

How do I change my business model to sell managed services?

Major changes to business models are necessary for customers set in a new type of market. In this post we will look at the two most common changes that benefit cloud delivered services.

Sales:
The delivery of early cloud solutions (like hosted email) has led to freemium customer expectations.  Freemium could mean a try-and-buy model (a limited offer of free services before costs kick in) or a limited free service (with added capabilities that incur charges). Either sales model requires current processes to adapt to this change.

Support:
The cost of phone support is prohibitive when some MSP models are considered. Exorbitant costs force providers to pay extra attention when building a solution that requires limited service or when providing email only service in the base subscription cost while at the same time charging an additional fee for a phone support with guaranteed response times.

With whom should I partner?

Cloud services delivered to consumers (e.g. email) do not need to report the backend infrastructure. On the other hand, enterprise customers expect a guarantee that infrastructure meets multiple compliance standards. As a result, MSPs need to evaluate partners whose infrastructure capabilities can be leveraged to differentiate their solution from competition.

What skills are needed to build a managed services organization?

Cloud delivered services require a programmable infrastructure to deliver solutions in a continuous delivery model. Customers have become accustomed to multiple solution upgrades a year without disrupting business. Development skills needed for such solutions are hard to come by. MSPs need to evaluate their own skills, understand needs of the solution they are trying to deliver, and acquire appropriate talent before embarking on a MSP solution journey.

With such challenges, the time is ripe for a summit that exclusively addresses MSP needs. Like many technology providers, IBM is providing a summit for MSPs at their IBM Edge conference in June to help providers manage this tsunami of change. While many events provide static content, IBM plans to address attendee needs through a crowd-sourced session where attendees can share their topics of interest. The responses will be measured, and topics that generate the most interest will be addressed during the summit.

Looking forward to your participation and to hearing your topics of interest at this event.  Feel free to share you opinions here via a comment, tweet me @RobustCloud or take a survey

The data centers of these mid-market customers often consisted of just a few dozen servers, so it was easy to relocate them. But that means this reseller’s future of selling and installing on-premise servers is under siege. He knew he had to transform his small company of 10 employees to providing end-to-end services, not just selling boxes with a declining services component.

This was just the first of several interactions I had with traditional IT resellers forced to change into soup-to-nuts Managed Service Providers (MSPs). But how do you evolve into a soup-to-nuts MSP? That’s a concern many resellers are grappling with and one of the reasons IBM is holding an MSP Summit at their upcoming IBM Edge conference in June.

While everyone talks about cloud computing as a disruptive trend, attention is more often paid to the manner in which end-users adopt the technology. But cloud computing is not just about technology adoption but also about fundamental changes in the ways a business buys IT services. Today, customers increasingly prefer to acquire IT services on a pay-as-you-go model.

As a result, Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and Systems Integrators (SIs) can adapt by changing their business models to meet changing customer expectations through a MSP model. Along with those changes, MSPs are expanding their portfolios by partnering with technology vendors who provide differentiating core capabilities to compete in the new MSP/cloud marketplace. These partnerships can assist current and new MSPs to meet or exceed their customers’ expectations with innovative offerings.

MSPs also face the challenge to provide reliable services as well as to expand their portfolios to grow revenues. With the automation that accompanies IT cloud delivery, all this must be accomplished with services making up a smaller proportion of the transaction value. MSPs providing a narrow set of capabilities can use that foothold to cross-sell solutions that are now possible through emerging cloud technologies. For example, providers with backup and disaster recovery capabilities can add security to their portfolios and vice-versa.

Growing demand for cloud services requires MSPs to evaluate their existing customers, employees’ skills and current portfolio before moving forward. Some important questions MSPs need to ask when crafting strategies are:

• How do I change my business model to sell managed services?

• With whom should I partner?

• What skills are needed to build a managed services organization?

These questions must be addressed with urgency by MSPs as the rapidly changing market allows first-movers to take a big lead. I will address some of these questions in an upcoming blog post.

IBM is one of the technology vendors addressing the needs of their business partners to adapt to the new IT environment. I will be speaking at the IBM MSP Summit held in conjunction with their Edge event on June 11 and look forward to hearing your feedback on the role of MSPs in this new ecosystem.

With the skills shortage in cloud computing skills and an effort to improve developer productivity, vendors are in a race to reduce the complexity of deploying cloud enabled solutions. Abstracting the infrastructure to overcome major barriers of security and scalability while avoiding vendor lock-in is key to PaaS vendor success. Customers use different approaches to leveraging PaaS. Customers who have substantial investments in Salesforce users tend to utilize a Force.com solution that allows them to extend their CRM implementation. Vendors with a larger application development portfolio are more likely to use PaaS solutions that allow the choice of the underlying cloud infrastructure like CloudFoundry.

The PaaS market and solutions are divided into different categories to help customers develop cloud solutions:

1. SaaS vendors enabling their users to leverage the existing cloud stack. One example is Force.com

2. IaaS vendors building PaaS capabilities to complement and enhance their offerings. Amazon’s Elastic Beanstalk is a good example.

3. Specialty vendors addressing specific cloud issues like integration, database, testing & security. An example is SOASTA for testing.

4. PaaS vendors developing open solutions to abstract multiple IaaS platforms. CloudFoundry & OpenShift are solutions in this category.

So far, large IT vendors have been lacking in a clear PaaS strategy. Due to the breath of their portfolios, products are needed in several of the categories above. The challenge for these vendors is to build coherent messaging able to convince customers to adopt PaaS as part of their IT frameworks. Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Salesforce have built a comprehensive set of products to help customers embark on their cloud journeys.

Large customers using emerging technologies are hard to come by.  Financial institutions are generally slow to adopt bleeding technologies for multiple reasons, and risk avoidance plays a big role. It was refreshing to see Apprenda’s case study outlining the JP Morgan Chase use of private PaaS in IT shops of large enterprises.  Some of the measures of success in the case study were:

• 2000 applications hosted
• 700% improvement in developer productivity
• 70% increase in infrastructure utilizations
• 50 days improvement in average application time to market

While there are many case studies floating around enterprise adoption of PaaS technologies, it is surprising to see a large enterprise like JP Morgan Chase adopt solutions from a small vendor like Apprenda to significantly improve the efficiency of their IT operations. While the case study does not specify the underlying hardware, infrastructure optimized for the cloud like HP’s Moonshot or OpenCompute could be game changers for enterprises.

While Amazon is mostly known for its Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) capability, start-ups often use Amazon’s PaaS capabilities in solutions. CoupSmart, a Cincinnati startup, leverages Amazon’s Elastic Beanstalk to remove complexity from the scaling and monitoring of CoupSmart solutions. While Amazon’s PaaS solution is good for start-ups, Amazon’s challenge is to make the solution appealing for use by enterprises.

Workshops like Deploycon are a refreshing change as they offer attendees an opportunity to gain a clear understanding of an emerging disruptive technology. While the atmosphere inside the workshop hall was based on open discussions without vendor pitches, attendees enjoyed the opportunity to meet vendors outside for one-on-one discussions. My hope is for similar workshops to be held on other emerging technologies like Software Defined Networks.

OpenStack Summit is being held this week, bringing together a large contingent of worldwide supporters of this emerging cloud standard. I look forward to PaaS vendors coexisting with open standards like OpenStack to offer a value proposition that fundamentally changes the IT landscape in large enterprises.

Platform as a Service (PaaS) is often hawked by proponents as a technology that can improve application development by abstracting the infrastructure layer, envisioning a future where business users log on to a portal and assemble an innovative application without involving technical folks. For CIOs with large enough application development budgets, PaaS can deliver significant improvement to efficiency by embracing the DevOps model. For smaller enterprises and start-ups, PaaS can be a game changer by enabling custom applications to be built and delivered at lightning speed leveraging public cloud resources.

When enterprises adopt cloud computing, most expect lower costs to result. However, significantly more value can be harvested through a cloud’s ability to improve business agility. Software as a Service (SaaS) and Business Process as a Service (BPaaS) are easily measurable, since invoices are based on the volume of transactions consumed. However, since PaaS hides the underlying infrastructure complexity from developers, a great deal of the responsibility is placed on vendors who deliver the service.

Herein lies the challenge of PaaS adoption. Abstraction of infrastructure is the underlying value that removes the need for a developer to understand the intricacies of the entire cloud computing set-up, including integration, storage, network and compute resources. PaaS vendors are expected to optimize systems for best value to users and follow necessary protocols to ensure that users are meeting compliance guidelines. Recently, some users claimed to have been overcharged for infrastructure, suggesting that the PaaS vendor did not optimize resource utilization, leaving users responsible for the additional costs. While users get value from reduced complexity, they understandably tend to lose trust in vendors when they experience the abstracted infrastructure used inefficiently.

So how do vendors open visibility into PaaS infrastructures and remove any doubts users might have regarding the efficiency of the technology? While vendors are adding functionality to PaaS (like support for multiple languages or infrastructure portability), providing visibility into and clear communication of performance are important and must be continuously refined as adoption increases. Vendors and users need to collaborate so that best practices can be shared in the community. Finally, measurement standards should be developed to help users benchmark the performance comparing multiple PaaS platforms.

At Deploycon (www.deploycon.com) I will be moderating a panel on PaaS Visibility with experts from Ravello Systems, Engine Yard and HP. We plan to discuss the PaaS visibility problem, especially with regards to resource allocation, security and choice of components. It is our hope that the discussion increases awareness and helps PaaS users trust the platforms they choose.

We are offering exclusive discounts for RobustCloud readers:

• The first 10 readers to register for the conference (using the code DCCOMP3) will have their conference fee waived.
• All other RobustCloud readers who register, (using the code DCDI50 ) will enjoy 50% off the conference fees.
• All Deploycon attendees will also receive access to CloudConnect keynotes and the expo hall.

Recently, I attended the Strata and IBM Pulse 2013 Conferences that were relatively different but that both incorporated common analytics themes. The Strata Conference is independently organized and focused on data analytics while IBM Pulse, run by the company’s Tivoli organization, primarily targets systems management.

Pulse 2013 focused more attention on analytics than last year’s event.  While the Strata Conference focused on start-ups that demonstrated interesting analytic products, IBM is looking to leverage analytics as a core competency by embedding those processes into current solutions.  Speaking at IBM’s recent investor meeting, CEO Ginni Rometty projected $20B in analytics and big data revenues by 2015.  To meet this goal, all IBM brands seem to be adding analytic capabilities.

One analytics area I found interesting at both Strata and IBM Pulse were solutions focused on system logs.  Computer data logging is a common practice and supports the goal of keeping a history of administrator activities and problem diagnoses.  After an outage, logs are thoroughly analyzed by technicians who scour for the root cause then take appropriate steps to fix malfunctioning components.

The number of inter-connected components in a cloud computing infrastructure significantly increases the volume and variety of log data produced, as well as its importance.  Traditional log file solutions leveraged legacy database technologies that are unable to process data being created at the variety and velocity today in a timely and cost effective manner. At the Strata Conference, Glassbeam and Splunk offered interesting solutions; and at Pulse, IBM released a new product capability in their SmartCloud portfolio that analyzes logs, events and metrics in an integrated manner. Let’s discuss each in turn.

• Glassbeam’s goal is to provide a platform to help companies get intelligence from machine data.  Their partnerships with LogiXML, OpSource (now part of Dimension Data) and Vertica (now part of HP) give them the capability to quickly assemble an innovative solution.  Capabilities that focus on customer intelligence, product engineering and service revenue will be of interest to any organization looking to leverage intelligence and value from log data.

• Splunk surprised a lot of folks when their stock price doubled on the first day of trading after they went public — offering insight to investors’ thinking regarding Splunk’s capabilities and the value of log analytics to customers. While Glassbeam is a niche and vertical solution, Splunk is a broad solution that covers the gamut of logs from call centers to click streams.

• IBM is a late entrant into developing a core product focused on log analytics leveraging new technologies. Their new product is promising as it integrates competencies from multiple software divisions as well as the recent Vivisimo acquisition.  This combination of products brings the challenge of integration and installation while allowing the new product to pull strengths of multiple best-of-breed products.  By integrating systems manuals as an additional source to identify specific problems, this new workload analytics capability will be a good addition for existing and new IBM Tivoli customers.

Application logs have offered ways to diagnose system problems for a long time. Analyzing logs from multiple operational processes is a new challenge, and new technologies like Hadoop provide an excellent way to proactively act on intelligence gained.  As technologies mature, technology giants will be forced to introduce new products to meet customer needs.

The ability to create new products rapidly is demonstrated by newcomers like Glassbeam and Splunk, changing the IT landscape.  Pulse 2013 exhibited legacy product improvements along with new products bundling multiple capabilities from a diverse portfolio to address customer demand. Existing technology vendors need to quickly build their own products or acquire companies that will allow them to fill in this void in their portfolios.  Predictive analytics from log data is a good example of how businesses can add significant value to their customers.

Krish Krishnan from Sixth Sense presented on the first day of Strata and made an interesting comment on one of his slides: “The Gen Z and Millennial Generation of buyers will not be swayed by traditional engagement models of selling products and services.” Having worked with large enterprise vendors, I have seen many sales deals closed based on relationships between vendor account teams and enterprise IT buyers that often take years to cultivate. Customers take a long time to develop solution requirements in the form of Requests for Proposal (RFP) and then mandate proofs of concepts from vendors before they make a buying decision. While Krish identified these buyers as just Gen Z and the future, I think anyone past generation Y are ready for a new model.

As a result, enterprise IT vendors have no choice but to spend countless hours on pre-sales efforts in order to battle competition and do their best to fulfill customers‘ requirements. The problem with this model is that it is expensive to manage and maintain, and customers may take months to reach a solution selection decision. This sales model fundamentally challenges business leaders to meet IT agility demands.

A number of solutions highlighted at Strata were designed to transform the status quo of enterprise IT purchasing behavior. Innovative vendors help customers easily analyze their data in order to visualize a probable pattern that detects anomalies and identify opportunities to improve productivity. Platforms leveraged popular cloud services to make it easy to develop and deploy solutions. Vertical solutions targeted specific industry issues with the goal of harvesting useful information from the data.

For those companies that need specific skills, there were systems integrators who offered enterprise ready analytics solutions on the cloud. These approaches allow customers to quickly evaluate solutions and progress on their journey to adopting BigData initiatives.

In the past, on-premises solutions often required dozens of Compact Discs to simply install the product. This kind of complexity is no longer acceptable to the new breed of enterprise users. Instead, they want sales approaches that help employees to make informed IT decisions faster. Product vendors that allow a solution to be tried out without handholding by an army of pre-sales technical staff remove the complexity of running a proof of concept. When a bake-off between multiple vendors can be completed in days rather than months (as was common in the past), enterprise agility is taken to a whole new level.

A common trend these days are for business users to bypass the IT department mandates. These renegades are often called “Shadow IT”. The need for Shadow IT as a way to out maneuver enterprise IT will be overcome by Generation Y employees delivering data analytics solutions to business users faster. With some of the simplicity demonstrated at the Strata conference, enterprise adoption of BigData is sure to accelerate. The winners will be innovative start-ups who cater to expectations of new enterprise buyers.

Frustration with complexity has led Procter & Gamble CIO Filippo Passerini (along with IT leaders from Fedex and Boeing) to demand a different model for developing business software.  To bolster their capabilities, P&G announced a strategic partnership with Verix Business Intelligence, a start-up technology company that delivers intelligent business alerts.  This trend of enterprises to risk partnering with innovative start-ups to meet their business needs will increase if enterprise solutions do not meet their expectations.

Since legacy vendor products are difficult and expensive to implement, the market is ripe for significant disruption. The lack of skills exacerbates the problem, especially with small and medium business customers.  Commodity hardware combined with open source software brings the capability to deliver innovative solutions to the market.  Some companies are packaging skills with cloud-delivered solutions to deliver significant results to customers.

Strong relationships that current enterprise vendors enjoy with their customers make it difficult for disruptors to get a foothold.  Customers locked-in to vendors find it very difficult to move out of existing technology platforms.  Since BigData analytics is such a new field, disruptors face a different challenge: preparing customers for new technologies with low cost of entry and easy-to-use solutions. To be successful they need to help customers in one or more of the following areas:

1. Collect new sources of information
2. Analyze this new information in co-relation with existing data
3. Deliver real-time insights in a cost effective way

Some customers are leveraging analytics to give them a huge benefit over competitors.  Target uses loyalty cards to predict behavior in providing relevant coupons for their future purchases.  When existing customer data is combined with social networking and sensor data, it gives retailers a powerful tool to develop real-time targeting of customers through mobile devices.  Other examples of widespread use will be when innovative technology can be used to reduce customer churn, improve fraud detection and improve marketing messages based on customer intelligence.

When I attend the Strata Conference next week, I look forward to speaking with disruptive vendors who will be able to provide customers with innovative solutions.

Converged infrastructure solutions designed to meet these requirements are being developed and marketed by many vendors including Cisco, Dell, HP, IBM, Oracle and VCE. With the costs of maintenance skyrocketing, enterprises are also looking to converged infrastructures as an answer to their perennial IT problems.

Only IBM and Oracle have well-defined, end-to-end and consolidated IT solutions that allow enterprises to tackle infrastructure, middleware and analytics as discrete solutions. IBM’s PureSystems portfolio utilizes a “Pure” prefix born out of the Expert Integrated Systems theme while Oracle uses the “Exa” prefix under the umbrella of Engineered Systems.

Some of the product families are shown in the table below:

Both IBM and Oracle target existing partners of shared customers and encourage these partners to become Pure- and Exa- Ready. A greater challenge will be to get start-ups to use IBM and Oracle platforms as the underlying infrastructure to develop their SaaS solutions.

Recently I attended an IBM PureSystems Executive Summit held at Huntington Beach, California. The agenda had senior IBM executives present their strategy to help customers with their transformation. With customers depending on improved business outcomes from IT, it was not surprising that it was a major theme during the entire summit. Enterprise customers and partners shared their experience in using IBM solutions that was well received. I noted two interesting announcements:

1. Mini-packaged PureApplication: When enterprises embark on new initiatives, they prefer a low investment that does not need approval from upper management. My biggest concern when IBM announced the PureSystems family last year was the high cost of entry with the minimum configuration of 96 cores. Earlier this month, IBM announced a much lower cost of entry with the 32 core version of the PureApplication product. The smaller package (also referred to as Cloud in a Box) enables enterprises to experiment with a lower investment and may entice mid-market companies to use the platform to support new solutions to their customers. The “Pay as You Grow” model allows qualified partners to add capacity as needed.
2. Application Patterns: A persistent headache for enterprises is the time required for installation, configuration and management of software. IBM’s “Patterns” which are pre-optimized/integrated solutions developed by IBM and ISV partners, are meant to help PureApplication customers overcome these hurdles while also reducing the time to market for solutions. One of the new Patterns that IBM announced addressed mobile application enablement and management, which is critical to the success of many enterprises. Getting partners to leverage this pattern in delivering cloud services to customers would make it even more beneficial.

While most vendors are hawking pre-integrated systems, there are major disruptors entering the market. For example, ProfitBricks provides user-defined virtual servers of up to 48 cores each is partnering with data center leader SwitchNAP for facilities that provides start-ups optimum service solutions. If enterprise vendors want to break into the start-up space, they will have to come up with similar capabilities.

The IBM Executive Summit offered an excellent overview of the benefits of the company’s PureSystems family. While I am optimistic about the short-term success of IBM in their efforts to make IT simpler for enterprises, they will need to adapt to expectations from innovators and start-ups. In order to truly transform themselves, enterprises need to incorporate more of a start-up DNA into their culture. When enterprise vendors are able to meet the challenging and dynamic requirements from start-ups, they increase the likelihood of being able to meet new enterprise expectations.

The change also reflects IBM’s overall direction away from selling products to customers to focusing on business outcomes. The three main themes of the Connect 2013 conference were Social Business, Smarter Commerce and Smarter Workforce. These new focus areas are designed to enable IBM to expand into new markets while enrolling new clients.

Social interactions and mobile access bring along a large amount of data snippets, so analytics is an essential piece required to harvest maximum value. Therefore, the Day 2 keynote was appropriately delivered by IBM’s Information Management organization that focuses on analytics. Without analytics, developing deep insights from social interactions accelerated by mobile access is simply not possible. Rapid reaction to market sentiments will differentiate social companies from other companies. Social interactions will bring about a big value to IBM and its customers if properly leveraged with the value proposition differentiators listed for the following themes:

Smarter Commerce:

• managing empowered customers with personalization
• viewing customers from a 360 degree view leading to increased customer satisfaction 
and better retention
• improving customer loyalty through offers based on insights from location and context
• engaging customers with additional interactions from mobile devices

Smarter Workforce:

• building better teams with shared values to deliver better solutions to customers
• acquiring talent to leverage social networks
• improving innovation by encouraging social interaction
• reducing turnover by leveraging social media to improve trust between the employer and employee

There are big challenges for enterprises to transform into a social business, especially since enterprise leadership very often sees more risks than gains when considering social strategies. An age barrier exists in many established enterprises with leadership that is unaware of how the younger workforce operates. (Blake Landau, founder of Artemis and a Huffington Post blogger, articulated the challenge of diversity and age for IBM in a well-written HuffPo post where she estimated that 90% of attendees at IBM Connect were middle-aged men.)

Becoming a social business depends on participation from people across the business environment, including employees, partners and customers. The value of social innovation is built on platforms of teams rather than individuals. Recent restructuring of workforces in many organizations has left very little time or motivation for employees to participate in social networking or to contribute disruptive ideas. Much has been said about the Return on Investment in social initiatives, but only broader adoption can enable organizations to accurately measure anecdotal and quantifiable results.

Facebook’s rapid growth does not mean enterprises can easily replicate similar success. Instead, they need to drive social media adoption in the same manner as they promote wellness programs to drive down healthcare costs. Just as healthier employees contribute to the bottom line with reduced sick days and improved productivity, social-enabled employees can contribute more fully to better job and business innovation.

Driving social adoption among employees can increase partner and customer participation, too. Initiatives like viral adoption have been tried, but success is spotty. Direct benefits to employees are needed to achieve the goal of improved engagement. Just as employees get reduced insurance premiums from getting annual healthcare exams, they could similarly be rewarded for writing blog posts, gaining more internal and external followers, etc. Analytical tools, like those IBM offers for monitoring social interactions, can and should play a big role in developing quantifiable measurements to award appropriate incentives.

Although IBM Connect 2013 was a useful conference to impart knowledge on becoming a social business and enabling technologies, enterprises need to suggest a strategy that includes motivating adoption. Once such incentives are put into place as part of a broader social media strategy, employees will naturally gravitate to becoming more social, therefore positively contributing to enterprise business benefits. Once a core mass of participation has been achieved, other non-monetary motivation factors, like sense of corporate purpose, will rally corporate social maturity.

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