 Okay, welcome back everyone. We're live in Las Vegas for IBM's information on demand user conference. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE, and I'm joined by co-host Dave Vellante. This is theCUBE, our flagship program where we go out to the events, extract a signal from the noise. Our next guest is Jeff Schick, not Frick. I did that earlier, who works for SiliconANGLE. Jeff, welcome to theCUBE. Hello. We've chatted a couple years ago and I want to share with the folks out there that you've been in the social software space, you're the vice president of social software, for a long time, and you've seen the movie, Enterprise Software, now we've got the current trends here. IBM has had a lot of track record in social software. So my first question is, what's changed right now in social software? Why is it so relevant and what do you guys have right now and what are you guys positioned for in this market? Well, I'll tell you. I think we got started back in 2007 where we brought forward the first integrated social software platform for business. And by bringing that forward, it really became apparent that it was our view that you could better connect people with people and people with information, that people were moving beyond email and instant message as a primary way of sharing. And so at the time, we had observations in terms of the sharing that was going on in MySpace, the fledgling Facebook, there was no Twitter at that stage of the game and it was pretty clear that people were creating content and sharing easier than ever before. You used to have to know HTML or some sort of complex authoring tool and when I first got started, I tried to position it. This stuff is so easy to use, even young people can use it, but I say it much differently today. And I think the inflection point is that there's not a country on the planet, there's not an industry on the planet that doesn't have key customers leveraging these technologies to better their overall business purpose. And so in doing so, you start to create traction and visibility. TD Bank is using these technologies to connect 120,000 people across their enterprise right out into the retail store locations. And so their retail employees are allowed to describe their wow moments of the day and share them so that they can have better customer service, create better customer satisfaction, have the clients be delighted with their interaction in the branch. And I think with that groundswell of activity, you're starting to see everyone consider that as a high performance company. So I want to drill down on the ease of use questions. That's really kind of what we're seeing. And we're seeing kind of two camps of people. And I want to get your perspective on what you're seeing. You know, folks who understand the connections model of, hey, we got to connect our users and our workforce, et cetera. And then the folks who see Twitter, they see Facebook, this is the new way to connect with their customers and their employees. So one camp, yeah, I'm familiar with it. And then the new camp of, hey, I should be doing that. So that's kind of a little bit of a marketing built into the hype of the trend around social media. But deploying it has to be easy. So I want you to talk about your perspective, what you're seeing, and then the ease of use, not only from a tool standpoint, but rolling it out as an enterprise pulls this huge software opportunity and who's going to run it? Do they have to step up for it? Is it easy or easy? Some solutions we've heard, not that easy. So, you know, here's some social software. What does that mean? So talk about the ease of use and ease of use from a user standpoint, meaning the people deploying. Well, so from an ease of use perspective, I think that the software needs to be so easy. It doesn't need an instruction manual to use. No one has to tell you how to press a button to make a blog post, right? You shouldn't have to. But what is not genetic but learned is, how do I create a vibrant community? You know, create the executive sponsorship, who owns the community, that you have a healthy set of contributors and communicators, and that there are people that are leveraging this information for their business purpose as readers, lurkers, you know? And so, I think there is, you know, a way to approach adoption in the enterprise focused on a set of social business patterns that allow you to have real success and growth within the base. But with that said, in terms of a, you know, user experience point of view, that user experience has to be simple and easy to use and brought into the context of the way people work. So, if I live in my email, how can I get my status updates within a sidebar? How can I see the files that are shared within my social network? Can I make it that simple to use? And, you know, as we deploy these technologies, there are a lot of people that aren't considered technologists or knowledge workers per se, but they really are knowledge workers. At Lowe's, they've deployed this capability across all of the Lowe's stores around the country. And, you know, I thought one of the great stories coming from them was there was a young lady in the paint department and she had these, you know, expensive Teflon trays and she had these cheap plastic trays and they were selling a lot of cheap plastic trays, but none of these, you know, $19, you know, Teflon trays. She said, let me try an experiment. She took the paint and dumped it into the Teflon tray, let it harden overnight. The next day she put it out on the counter, pulled the paint out, put it in, paint out in, people got to see that. By the end of the day, people that had saw that bought the Teflon paint tray and she sold out the paint trays in just a couple days. So the first thing she did was blog about that as a best practice so that across the nation, people in paints departments were running that little experiment and they inevitably sold out of all of their Teflon paint trays. The very next thing she did after that was to blog about how she can't get any more Teflon paint trays. They're all back-ordered now. And so this stuff is so simple to use that they're connecting people with people and people with information in a way that, you know, any type of role, any job can benefit by finding an expert, having a threaded interaction and so forth. Why do people come to you? I've just been sort of thinking about the reasons why. Somebody would want to implement an enterprise, you know, social strategy. So there's obviously security, the governance piece of it, the ability to customize. You mentioned email, you know, before integration if you will. Access to the data because you can't, you know, you can't get anything, you know, if you get a little bit out of Facebook and you know, Twitter if you get the fire hose, et cetera, and making it a core competency of the collaboration approach. Is that why people are buying from you? Am I missing some things here? I wonder if we could talk about that a little bit. What are the drivers that you're seeing within your customers? Well, so first off, I think we've done a good job with the technology we've created. We've sat as the number one social software for business at IDC through a market share study for the last four years in a row. You know, Yammer, Jive, are farther down in the list. And so we're really out there working with clients and I think we have great technology, but you know, I think also IBM drinks its own champagne. I prefer that expression over the English version where one would eat their own dog food, but we drink our own champagne. And so not only do we have great technology, but we have the knowledge and wherewithal to help organizations recognize how can I gain business value, right? And not just soft ROI, but hard ROI. For example, when IBM rolled out its community capabilities and social network capabilities on IBM.com, developer works as one of the largest communities on the planet. We have several million people participating, sharing information there. And when we moved from the only way to talk to us is through a telephone to establishing communities with discussion forums and a level of interaction, IBM saved $100 million the first year in terms of support. And that has only grown better over time because now you're capturing the tacit knowledge of that level of interaction and people are starting to move to self-service. And so there's a lot of examples of where you can demonstrate hard ROI and benefits to business in a way that is across every dimension of the clients that we serve. So okay, that's an example of hard ROI using cost savings as the numerator and I presume you got revenue examples as well, right? Yeah, of course. So can you share some of those with us? Well look, so I like to talk about some of the client experiences that we have. So for example, Petrobos, one of the largest petroleum providers on the planet are using the technology to support an entire set of safety activities and learning endeavors and sharing. So if I'm out on an oil rig platform and I'm replacing a gasket, if those employees don't know how to do that and approach that through training and through being able to find information, there could be some sort of catastrophic disaster. Bureau Veritas was established in the early 19th century to certify a ship was able to make the passage that it was booked for and then they then talked with the insurance company about what sort of premium would be set. The Bureau Veritas now is one of the organizations on the planet that examines quality in every single product out there. They certify the flat panels that are in the market, they certify the shirt that you're wearing, the coffee that you drink, and they're using this to connect their experts so that they get the right person on the right opportunity at the right time to yield the right result. And that's allowed them to expand into substantial markets. CEMEX is a cement company. They're using the technology to more quickly create products. As they created the ReadyMix product, they did it in one geography, but then as they moved around the planet, regional requirements for cement based upon climate and environment needed to be factored into the overall mix of that ReadyMix cement. And it's the way they were able to roll out a product 25% faster than they ever were able to do before. So there's a lot of examples of the business value gained in the way one can measure that. Jeff, one of the things that we've always talked about, it's always like there's the obvious, aha, we have to do this, ROI's are gonna be there, there's the blue sky, in some cases specific hard ROIs. But I gotta ask you the question, IBM has an organization that totally understands this, you guys have been doing communities, you have the tooling, your IBM, a lot of other organizations don't have that. So one of the things we've talked about is that the social software market or social media teams are small. Kinda like the web days back in the 90s when it was like a couple guys running HTML and rolling out the website. So for the companies that don't have the DNA of social, we've heard that some of those other platforms, like Jive and Yammer's, they get sold these community platforms but get the world's changing so fast that they feel stuck and understaffed. So the big challenge is what tooling do they need to do? Can you elaborate on your perspective on that? For organizations that are saying we want to commit to social software, is it just about having a social media team or is it more a line of business? What does that crossover happen for scale within a company? So they say yes, we want social software, now it's how do I do it? Social media teams are kinda small, what's your take on that? Well, certainly the social media and communications teams have a role in how that can help communicate that company's messages or help the marketing team do the good work that they do to create a proper campaign and have an environment for sharing. But what we try to do is look at all of the different roles within an organization and start to assess in what ways can we transform the way they work in terms of whether it be leveraging expertise location, access to information. It really is an approach that really looks at the role more deeply. So if I'm a retail employee in a bank, how should it help me? If I'm someone that's on the marketing team building a new campaign, how can that help me? If I'm responsible for a merger and acquisition, how will this help me to do due diligence with the right people within the organization all the way through to in the process of the merger and acquisition? Can I do this outside my company boundaries where that sort of sharing has the proper information responsibility, stewardship of security, but allows you to work very closely with the acquiring company? So I think that you need to decompose. It's not one size fits all. So take me through some use cases where you've had success with some of your clients. Who makes the decision? Is it the CMO? Is it the business unit manager? Who's the user? Who's the influencer? Who's the deployer? Can you just walk us through? Because a lot of companies are trying to organize their staff. Where have you had the most success bringing that value to your customers? Well, so I can tell you this. As we've worked in, we have over 52,000 companies running our social business platform around the world. And as they're leveraging this sort of technology, it comes down to how do you get started? Well, that may originate in the IT organization with examining a better class of collaboration tools. It may happen within a line of business that says, I really think that we have the opportunity to better our overalls result by sharing in this way or working more closely with a partner or a client. So I think that those many entry points. There are many, many entry points. But with that said, I think that it takes all legs of the stool to be working together in a coordinated fashion. So for example, in the TD Bank example, they created an executive steering committee which was made of their chairman, their CIO, the heads of the lines of business, their compliance department, their legal department, human resource, and marketing. And that team said, we're going there. We're on the social business journey. We genuinely believe in the benefits and value we could derive. And so let no obstacle stand in our path. And I sat on that committee as one of the vendors. So it's top-down and bottom-up. So it's organic. You can come in at any entry point, and then it gets some momentum. In some cases, then the business models change. So what you're saying is top-down is more of a business model mindset from the top with organic participation from the folks in the organization. Organic comes from the people that just want to use this sort of stuff. Great. So let me ask you a question. What's some of the exciting things that you've seen in the market? I mean, you've been in the social space, I've said for a long time, collaboration spaces evolve. Certainly it's more if it's really hot right now, people want to change their business. What are some of the most exciting things that you've seen that you've said, well, I wouldn't have expected that to be such a massive home run? Well, I had the opportunity to create connections starting back in 2006. And as we've brought that technology out, seeing the way that people use it is very, very exciting to me. As I see that logo in their masthead, and they've done the customization, and I see their branding and their culture in that, it's thrilling whether it be the United Nations that has deployed our social capability across the entire enterprise, loving strong content management and analytics to help bring to the forefront that, which is important. And so I really think that, seeing how the clients are really using it and really changing the world or changing their business is really tremendous gratification. You mentioned sharing. Obviously people want to connect with each other. That's obviously the trend that we believe in as well. But it's also made a change to how people are deploying their communities in their forum software. It used to be, okay, we had our website, corporate website, company.com, you go there, they'd be like login, you have forums, they're still there, but there's now an emphasis of public forums that are happening. Tweets, got hashtags now, out there, there's a lot of crowdsourcing, so reviews, yeah, so all kinds of new dynamics are changing from an entry point standpoint, more omni-channels for sales opportunities for social. How is that changing those older models of communities and forums? Certainly they're not going to go away. It'll always be that intimate environment. But now you gotta bring that out to the crowd. What have you seen as a success path for folks saying, hey, I've got an investment in community software and aka forums or blogs. Now I want to go out into the wild where the people are. Sure, and at IBM, we've done just that. I mean, seeing IBM as genuinely a social business, we put in front of an employee social media guidelines, and every year, every single IBM employee need certify against those business conduct guidelines and social media guidelines, so they understand that as they use social media, describe who you are, speak within the boundaries of your job, be constructive in the interaction, and so forth. And we let every single IBM employee be the voice of IBM. We're allowing them to get out on Facebook, in LinkedIn, and Twitter, and really talk about what they're doing. So it doesn't mean that a sales rep can go announce a product, that's my responsibility, but they can then use- They can leak a product. Right, they can, well, they shouldn't. Accident. But what they can do is if they're a sales rep, they can say, this product was just released, I want to share with this community on the internet, or I want to share with my clients a specific event, and use all channels to basically communicate, so in the years past it was, here is the one person that's the blogger on this particular topic, internet-facing, and now all of our employees are client-facing, leveraging social media on the internet, whether it be the private infrastructure we built out on dot com, or the cloud, or that they're leveraging those large, public social networks. I remember you and I in 2009, we talked about this when we first chatted on the phone about influence, and most people think of influence, they think of Twitter, Justin Bieber, these big names, kind of the long tail, people who are popular. What's your view on influence? I mean, obviously influence is anyone who influences others at some level of degree. With big data analytics, we're seeing some demos here with Watson and other software, where you can actually go in and saying, hey, that person is an influencer, but he's not like a big power blogger, but in the unique community he's in, he's an influencer. What's your take on this influence, and where do you think it's gonna go, and how does that integrate into some of the collaboration connections pieces? Well, I can tell you that we have a program inside of IBM called Voices, and we wanna use our employee base to amplify our communication. So, Facebook's model now for communication and advertising and the way one approaches getting a message out. We're asking our employees to retweet, we're asking our employees to repost and to share widely information that's important. So our marketing and communications team may get a message out there, it may touch a wide swath of people, but if we allow our employees to amplify that, you have the opportunity to really widen your message. And so, we're completely all in. We're using analytics tools to assess where the influencers are, but genuinely, we're using our employees as well to go out and whoever they're connected to amplify the communication and interaction that we'd like to get more widely distributed. We're here with Jeff Schick, Vice President of Social Software at IBM. We're out of time, but I wanna give you the final word. Share with the folks out there who aren't here. The vibe of IOD this year around the social business trend here. And then share in your own words how that's gonna look going forward. How do you see the market evolving? What are some of the possibilities that are around the corner that some of the folks might not see? So the vibe here at IOD around social business and just in your own words, what you think is possible around the corner that connect the dots, read the tea leaves. Well, look, no matter where I turn here, I see social business every place and it's prominently featured in the expo floor. It's prominently featured in all of the sessions. There's a lot, a lot of discussion about what social can do for you or your organization. But I'll tell you, when I got started and I had my title, the Vice President of Social Software, when I knocked on people's doors, back in the early time, people say, this stuff, social software, if I install it, are people just gonna goof around all day? Or is there such a thing as anti-social software? And surely there is, but today- Clog of violence, can people go like, but today people get it and they wanna better connect their people with people and people with information and they understand it will drive value and the leading companies- So you see new innovation coming around the corner fast. Yeah, real innovation coming fast. And new capabilities and tooling. Anything that you think that will be surprised to folks out there in terms of these new capabilities? Will it be that kind of privacy, those conversations? Well, I'll tell you a direction that we're taking that I think is really important. You know, as we look at people, people being the most important asset within an organization and having built that social business platform in and around helping that person do their work, we embraced the acquisition of Conexa, which is focused on a broad spectrum of human resource related capabilities. So as I have this idea about people being the front and center and most important asset within the organization, expanding that in a way where you're supporting, recruiting, onboarding, enablement, talent management, performance, and assessments, that all comes down to the workings of people. And so in times past, it might have been, I'm sensitive to the idea that we need document life cycle management from cradle to grave on a document. And certainly we have that all in on the social business platform. But this idea of people being the center of the universe, we're now extended that in a way we truly built the integration between social network and collaboration and the full range of things that you need to do to support someone from higher to retire. Yeah, we yesterday we heard about contextually aware concepts. And yeah, we love that message. We're big believers in that, focus on the people. Smarter work. Time savings, people's time as a scarce resource and connecting to relevance. Contextually relevant things. I think there's another Google in there somewhere and it's new modern era. So you guys doing great work. Jeff, thanks for coming on theCUBE. I appreciate Vice President of Social Software. This is theCUBE. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break. Guys, thanks for having me here today. Thanks, appreciate it.