IBM Unveils Software Product to Build Cloud Computing Business
September 20, 2011
International Business Machines Corp., the world’s largest computer-services provider, is offering a new software product that automates marketing and speeds up sales to entice businesses to use its servers.
If all of a company’s product and customer data is on IBM’s servers, IBM’s analytics can help it sell more efficiently to other businesses and consumers, the company said in a statement. For example, sales campaigns could be based on where products are geographically located and marketing campaigns could be automatically generated based on the tone of a customer’s Twitter post about a product…
The new product, which is the next step in IBM’s Smarter Commerce initiative, is part of a push to make $7 billion by 2015 from cloud computing, which allows a company to store and access data from IBM’s servers, the company said. IBM, based in Armonk, New York, has made “heavy investments” in the area, including $2.5 billion in acquisitions and hundreds of millions of dollars in research, said Craig Hayman, who oversees Smarter Commerce as general manager of IBM Industry Solutions.
The product “clarifies what these acquisitions in the fall were about, and gives a clear example of one of the ways IBM plans to pursue the cloud,” said Josh Olson, a Des Peres, Missouri-based analyst for Edward Jones & Co.
Acquisitions, Competitors
Last year, IBM acquired Unica Corp. and Coremetrics, which use analytics for online marketing, and Sterling Commerce, which helps companies manage their relationships with partners and suppliers. The company has said it plans to spend about $20 billion on acquisitions through 2015, after ending last year with $10.7 billion in cash.
Competitors Oracle Corp., SAP AG and Microsoft Corp. have not gone as far as IBM in using cloud technology for business services, Gene Alvarez, a Stamford, Connecticut-based analyst for Gartner Inc., said. IBM’s technology could attract industries like health care and telecommunications by doing for business-to-business transactions what Amazon.com Inc. does on its website, providing individualized marketing, he said.
“We now have organizations that you never would have thought of as e-commerce organizations, wanting a system like that,” Alvarez said.