Friday, 19 September 2008

IBM Unveils Center For Social Software

Recently at the Interop technology conference and exhibition, IBM said that it would open a social software center to encourage collaboration among IBM, its partners and its customers in developing Web 2.0 applications.

The new facility would be established in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

IBM's Center for Social Software will host research into how workers can best use Web 2.0 applications—such as blogs, wikis and enterprise mashups--to better communicate and collaborate with each other. "This is about people and driving better business outcomes," said said Bob Picciano, IBM's general manager for Lotus and WebSphere Portal products, during an Interop keynote presentation at which he announced the plan.

IBM says it wants to quantify use of social networking as a way to better understand and predict its uses. Researchers from IBM labs around the world may be rotated in and out of the center to work on specific projects, the company says.

According to the big blue, the center will include a corporate residency program that will link customers directly to IBM’s research teams to accelerate specific projects. Dow Jones and Thomson Reuters’ healthcare arm are already participating.

In addition to working with the corporate world, IBM's Center for Social Software will also reach out to academics. Cambridge is popular with technology and biotechnology companies due to the presence of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University.