When your company is 97 years old and grows in part through mergers and acquisitions, you’re going to have a variety of technology products running the business — or as Bob Burkhart puts it, “We have just about one of every solution and several of many.” As the mobile and collaboration infrastructure leader at Nationwide […]
This article originally appeared in our bi-weekly newsletter, the B2B Briefing. Sign up using the fields to the right of this page to get this kind of content before anyone else. It’s not like IBM has a shortage of experts to talk about technology and its impact on the workforce, so the choice of Diane […]
Businesses might consider their digital transformation efforts as an act of pushing boundaries and exploring new frontiers, but the most recent IBM TV commercial is a good reminder that few will ever top the ambitions of NASA during the Apollo 11 mission. In a 30-second spot that consists entirely of archival footage, IBM effectively newsjacks […]
To all those suggesting “B2B” should morph into “human to human” or that enterprises should market themselves more like consumer brands, the CEO of an agency that works with the likes of IBM, GE and SAS has a counterargument for you. As the founder of Centerline Digital, Charles Long said he’s familiar with an increasingly […]
The year 1776 was a momentous one in world events, not just for the declaration that begins, “In Congress, July 4,” but also for the publication of Adam Smith’s opus An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Smith’s book, a corner- stone of classical liberalism, laid the foundation for the […]
Here’s the problem with an annual list like B2B News Network‘s B2B Pros to Watch: we could justifiably run many of the same people we celebrated in 2018 — Anne Handley, Jay Baer, Lee Odden and so on — every single year. Of course, that wouldn’t be very interesting, and it would do a disservice […]
It’s going to take a combination of “world-class messaging,” creative new use cases and focusing more on solving problems than merely aiding sales people to reposition product marketing as a strategic function, according to experts in the field. Speaking at the Toronto stop of the Product Marketing Community conference late last week, consultants, trainers and […]
IBM’s decision over the weekend to acquire open source software provider Red Hat for more than $34 billion dollars will potentially create a major competitor to Microsoft and Amazon Web Services in the cloud computing space while possibly triggering a wave of other M&As among other B2B technology vendors, experts suggested. Armonk, N.J.-based IBM told […]
HR services firm Morneau Shepell is trying to tackle some of the biggest challenges affecting the mental health of business professionals by improving the artificial intelligence capabilities of a chatbot it introduced earlier this year. Speaking at the IBM Innovate conference in Toronto on Thursday, Morneau Shepell CIO Michael Lin said the chatbot, dubbed Ava, […]
A few days ago, Randy Guard was sitting in a quiet boardroom in San Diego’s Grand Hyatt where, only steps away, some of his biggest and most marquee customers were discussing their IT and business strategies as part of his firm’s Analytics Experience. The SAS CMO didn’t need any software, however, to know what was […]
There are startups marketing themselves as blockchain innovators, and there are established enterprises trying to innovate with blockchain. Vic Pascucci has a stock response to most of them: “Just use an f***n VPN.” The managing director of venture capital firm Lightbank was positioned as the resident contrarian at the recent Voice of Blockchain conference in […]
B2B companies that offer customer service primarily through e-mail and chat can get a better sense of their emotional state through a sentiment analysis feature TeamSupport is introducing to enterprise versions of its software. Dallas-based TeamSupport said the sentiment analysis functionality will be based on the natural language processing (NLP) technology used by IBM’s Watson […]
Supply chain processes rarely make for prime-time TV viewing, but a new commercial from IBM tells a story that connects blockchain and coffee to show what it can bring to accurate inventory tracking. In a clip called “Smart Supply Chain,” Big Blue takes viewers on a whirlwind tour of single-origin Kenyon coffee from its original […]
Despite the unanswered legal and regulatory questions, enterprises that create or participate in a private blockchain may have a chance to overcome the inefficient, expensive and vulnerable ways they exchange information and facilitate transactions today, speakers told the Conference Board of Canada’s first-ever summit on distributed ledger technology. While a growing number of business professionals […]
When Deborah Leff was preparing her presentation for IBM Think, she looked online to find the best antonym to the word “insight.” The top results were “ignorance” and “stupidity.” While not exactly an example of data science in action, the findings showed Leff, IBM’s global sales leader of business analytics, the stark difference between those […]
An enterprise IT marketing consulting company called Chief Nation whose customers include Microsoft, IBM and Intel says it will be able to boost account-based marketing results and generate more sales leads by integrating B2B intent data from Bombora. Chief Nation, which is based in the U.K., said the partnership will involving layering Bombora’s intent data […]
The Blockchain Research Institute is trying to move past controvesies around the way it communicated about its proposed faculty — as well as misrepresentations from a company led by one of its co-founders — and focus businesses on how to take strategic advantage of the distributed technology. Executives from large business and several governments converged […]
Companies that want to benefit from artificial intelligence should be looking at top-line value versus cost savings and how they can augment existing processes, according to the chief strategist of IBM’s Watson division. In his keynote speech at the Canadian Innovation Exchange (CIX) in Toronto Tuesday morning, Marc Teerlink predicted that in five years every major […]
A roundup of this week’s mergers and acquisitions in B2B… *** IBM Security announced plans to acquire Agile 3 Solutions, a developer of software used by the C-Suite and senior executives to better visualize, understand and manage risks associated with the protection of sensitive data. The addition of Agile 3 Solutions’ capabilities to IBM Security’s portfolio […]
North America to Remain the Most Profitable Market Microsoft Corporation accounted for a turnover in excess of US$ 93 Bn in 2015, with its latest bridge application tool “HockeyApp” launched in August 2016 gaining immense popularity amongst users. Adobe Systems Incorporated, Yahoo! Inc. (Flurry Analytics), International Business Machine Corporation (IBM), Tune, Inc., Google Inc. (Alphabet Inc.), Amazon Web Services, […]
