Social Business Research at Almaden

Ten years ago there was a significant shift in the way people interacted with each other: the web came to the workplace and became a serious business tool for organizations in industries of every kind. The evolution continues with the coming of age of Social Business as social computing, analytics, policies, governance and cultures are integrated into enterprise design and organizations are focused on socially-enabling business processes.

Jeff Pierce, IBM Research - Almaden
Mobile Computing Research Lead

In a recent media event at IBM Research - Almaden focused on how Social Business is helping organizations around the world embrace a new culture of transparency and collaboration, IBM GM for Social Business Alistair Rennie spoke to about 6 reporters and 4 analysts about IBM's strategy and IBM mobile computing research lead Jeff Pierce led a discussion about user studies and mobile devices in the Social Business world.

The attendees had access to a number of mobile/social Research demonstrations, including the crowdsourcing mobile phone app CreekWatch, IBM Connections and a few Twitter analytics projects developed out of the Social Media Analytics & Engagement area of IBM Research - Almaden. Much of the research is developed out of behavioral studies - including the interesting result that even as early as 2007 some users were already managing their activities across an average of 6 devices - many of which were published in the last 3 years:

Smart Phone Use by Non-Mobile Business Users
Presented at Mobile HCI 2011

Understanding Information Preview in Mobile Email Processing

Presented at Mobile HCI 2011

No Smart Phone Is an Island: The Impact of Places, Situations, and Other Devices on Smart Phone Use

IBM Research Report

Triage and Capture: Rethinking Mobile Email

IBM Research Report

Also! ReadWriteWeb's article "IBM Rethinking Mobile Email" from December 2011

"It's on my other computer!": Computing with Multiple Devices

Presented at CHI 2008

Following the event, influential Forbes blogger Haydn Shaughnessy reported on the evolution of social media to social business highlighting IBM's embrace of social technologies across the organization. The article discusses IBM's evolution into a social business and cites IBM as a category leader in social software. 

Jennifer Okimoto, Social Business Consultant from IBM's Global Business Services division, and speaker at this event, shared her thoughts on "Social Business Game Changers," which include behaviors, skills and attitudes: 

You can learn more about IBM's Social Business here. 

IBM storage gets more Hollywood hardware

In October, we announced that IBM's Linear Tape File Storage project earned a spot at the Emmy Award Ceremony in Hollywood, where the team received a golden statuette for "improving the ability of media companies to capture, manage and exploit content in digital form, fundamentally changing the way that audio and video content is manager and stored" (as stated by the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences).

Since then, IBM was awarded the HPA Engineering Excellence Award, presented by the 

Hollywood Post Alliance (HPA) for the invention of the Linear Tape File System, providing "a simple, cost efficient way to access and manage massive archives of data and digital assets." Arnon Amir, an Almaden researcher, received the award on behalf of IBM at the ceremony, at the Skirball

Cultural Center, Los Angeles.

Arnon shared some thoughts about the work he's done with his team to bring LTFS to this level of excellence. 

IBM has been working, for a number of years, on developing innovative storage solutions for the M&E 

market. LTFS is a prime example of IBM's ability to think out-of-the-box, develop a new technology and work with our partners and customers to lead a transformation through the industry. This collaboration, across multiple geographies, markets and technologies, demonstrates IBM's global leadership in storage systems.

When we started, the team was very small, however we only had a couple of shared tape drives in our lab to work with. One of core LTFS developers, Lucas Villa Real, worked remotely from IBM Brazil.  We set for him a webcam in our lab, showing the front of the tape drive 24 hours a day. Looking at the live video he could see the tape drive loading and unloading the tape as he tested his software. This must have been one of the most boring live videos ever streamed. :-) 

Later on, as the technology was hardened and transferred to product, the development team grew and span developers at multiple IBM locations Asia, Europe and America, with plenty of tape drives at all locations.

Seeing LTFS forming up from an idea to a product, now being adopted by many of our partners and customers in such a short time is truly fascinating. It is a great privilege to work with our excellent teams worldwide and to collaborate with so many IBM partners and customers. I feel very fortunate to have a part in this project.

IBM was also recognized as a Visionary M&E Company at this year's Storage Vision Conference (held in conjunction with the CES show). Also, December's issue of Storage Magazine Online listed LTFS as one of the six hot storage technologies for 2012, and was featured in Datamation's, "How Open Source Could Drive a Tape Storage Comeback" article. 

More coverage and analyst reviews: 

Computer Technology Review: LTO-5 and LTFS: Shaking the Pillars of Heaven

Backup Central: LTFS: Crazy Like a Fox

Clipper Group: Dealing with Cool and Cold Data — and Getting It 'Just Right' 

B&L Blog: LTO-5: Changing the Way You Look at Tape