IBM
IBM Corp. announced Wednesday its new cloud and on-premise offerings that will help organizations respond automatically to shifting consumer and business trends. The new solutions, Commerce-as-a-Service and Social Media Marketing, combine technology from acquisitions such as Unica, Coremetrics and Sterling Commerce with IBM research and development. These new software solutions are designed to help companies automate supplier and trading partner interactions, automatically turn marketplace insights into marketing and sales actions and connect online, mobile and social channels to physical stores.
With its Smarter Commerce initiative, IBM estimates the new market to be worth $20 billion in software alone. Smarter Commerce transforms how companies manage and adapt to customer and industry trends such as online, social and mobile shopping and purchasing.
"Smarter Commerce allows customers to shop or buy easily regardless of medium, channel or device," said Craig Hayman, general manager, IBM Industry Solutions. "Informed by deep customer insights, companies can provide a personalized customer experience that feels like a service to consumers."
The Commerce-as-a-Service, which accelerates and extends the delivery of Smarter Commerce capabilities with a cloud-based configure, price, quote offering that simplifies the "quote-to-cash" process by allowing clients to drive new revenue streams by bundling offers automatically. A Cross-Channel Selling offering which connects Web store fronts to mobile devices, social networks and other channels. This enables companies to generate new revenue streams by connecting products offered online to in-store purchasing and delivery. This software is optimized for IBM POWER7 Systems, allowing high-volume retailers to personalize customers' online shopping experiences, and handle online sales surges during peak shopping seasons without loss of performance.
In addition, the systems integrate customer buying information across all sales channels, including online, mobile, in-store, POS and kiosks. A Payments & Settlement solution delivers a flexible and secure PCI compliant payment capability at customer checkout. A Supplier Integration & Management offering connects and automates supplier interactions, providing clients with a dashboard view of activity as it happens. A cloud-based file transfer capability for moving large customer and partner data within and across businesses to support critical commerce needs faster and more efficiently.
Social Media Marketing, which delivers analysis of natural language processing of consumer sentiment in social media. This allows customers to receive tailored, one-to-one marketing offers automatically in real time.
IBM has enhanced its cloud-based Digital Marketing Optimization offering by adding a digital data exchange for the tagging, collection and syndication of customer data. IBM is also adding capabilities to analyze multiple enterprise web sites and speed the ability to optimize email communications and reporting from creation, to deployment, to social sharing.
IBM also launched Wednesday a new Global Center of Competence for Smarter Commerce. The new Center of Competence will be part of IBM Global Business Services and is comprised of highly skilled Smarter Commerce consulting experts who will help clients solve their complex buying, marketing, selling and servicing business problems. Additionally, IBM Global Business Services is introducing three new "quick-start" Smarter Commerce accelerator offerings. These new service offerings include rapid consulting engagements that help clients define measurable business outcomes they can achieve through Smarter Commerce and a roadmap to achieve them.
