Blue Ocean Strategy @ IBM – Customer Experience Lab Social Business & Analytics focus

IBM had been aggressively investing in social business initiatives since 2007 when company set up a separate unit for selling social business software under the brand name Connections and has built a significant customer base for this business. The company further boosted these initiatives with the launching of IBM Customer Experience Lab headquartered at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., and supported by researchers at IBM's 12 global labs, including Africa, Brazil, California, China, India, Israel, Japan, Switzerland and Texas. The lab merges skills across disciplines, including service science, industries research, mathematics and business optimization, social, mobile, Smarter Commerce, data mining, cloud computing, security and privacy, cognitive computing and systems management. IBM had realized the fact that growing social networks not only impact people’s lives but also significantly impact the business organizations and how they run their operations across the globe. People of all ages are aggressively engaging on various social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc. and also actively seeking to use those platforms even in their professional careers within the organizations. More and more employees are bringing in their own devices to the work place and this Bring Your Own device scenario is presenting a big challenge for business organizations. "Customers across the world are using innumerable channels—from social networks to online product review sites—to express their individual experience with products and services. This is fueling an explosion of data and driving a radical shift in how companies must engage with their customers to thrive and stay competitive," Ramesh Gopinath, director of IBM Research India, said in a statement.

Organizations too are significantly impacted by the digitization of media, documents and communications and have to equip their organizations with the suitable technology infrastructure that suits these trends. IBM had been betting big on the social business and analytics as essential for its future growth strategy and accordingly it is offering products like IBM Connections which is their social business platform offering. IBM has introduced a new suite of social, mobile and big data offerings to help businesses gain deeper insight into their customers' needs and desires. IBM Customer Lab since its inception through IBM Research scientists and business consultants have worked with more than 100 global clients and co-created a range of new technologies and services transformed and revolutionized the way companies interact and engage with customers. Digitization and digital customers had forced the organizations assess their brand loyalty initiatives and increase business growth by not looking at customers as mass audiences  but putting more emphasis increasing the value of personalized customer relationships. IBM is considered to be the market leader in the Social business software segment and as companies across the globe realizing the need to integrate the social networking platforms within the organization for both employee and customer engagement By focusing on the social business segment before the competition it is able to create dominant position in the initial stages of uncontested market place and the value innovation proposition it is offering is also is attractive for the clients as the clients are seeing significant return on investment.