LAS VEGAS - 04 mai 2010: At the IMPACT 2010 conference, IBM (NYSE: IBM) unveiled new offerings aimed at helping organizations integrate and automate their processes to increase efficiencies, reduce costs and find ways to grow their businesses. The company also released results of a survey of senior executives that sheds new light on what organizations need to do to increase their ability to compete in the global marketplace.

The new software expands IBM's leadership in the business process management (BPM) marketplace.  In the first-quarter of 2010, IBM reported double-digit revenue growth in its BPM and integration software portfolio.  Recognizing the increased demands from organizations to automate and integrate their businesses, IBM has built a base of over 20,000 practitioners, and is investing over $1 billion annually through R&D in addition to strategic acquisitions over the past 18 months.

  
“We are living in a business environment that is seeing unprecedented changes in the way people work, but at the same time presents enormous opportunities to expand productivity and profitability," said Craig Hayman, general manager, application and integration middleware, IBM.  “Through better business process management, organizations can manage ad-hoc and automate time-intensive tasks, freeing employees to do higher value work and providing consistent, repeatable and more efficient outcomes.” 

Driving Efficiencies for Improved Business Outcomes

IBM is a leader in providing clients with higher-value capabilities that enables them to better integrate with their network of partners, suppliers and customers.   

For example, IBM worked with Globe Telecom to implement a business process management platform, based on IBM's WebSphere, to integrate their business operations.  As a result, they have been able to shorten time-to-market for new products from six months to 40 days. In addition, they have reduced product development costs up to 90 percent, allowing them to improve margins and significantly reduce financial risks of new product launches.  With greater information sharing, insight and collaboration, Globe Telecom has also been able to better identify customers for more targeted offers.

Global Organizations Validate the Need for Business Agility

According to a new study from the IBM Institute for Business Value (IBV) which surveyed 275 global executives, those companies that are significantly outperforming in their industries have focused on driving business agility, through work practices and business processes that help their organizations become more dynamic, collaborative, and connected. 

The study also found that today’s market leaders are twice as likely to have used modeling and automation to understand and improve their business processes and are three times more likely to use collaborative workspaces.

These findings demonstrate that business processes are essential to enable the smooth and timely completion of everything from hospital admissions to product design and distribution, bill payment and claims processing.

   

Accelerating Industry Solutions

IBM today announced a new joint Center of Excellence between its Software Group and Global Business Services to help clients achieve greater agility and business performance.  As part of this initiative, IBM is also introducing new Industry Solution Accelerators that provide industry-specific templates to help clients in banking, insurance, healthcare, telecommunications, and industrial product lifecycle management accelerate their BPM projects. The offerings are based on industry standards and can be can be customized to meet an individual client’s unique business needs.

As part of today's news, IBM is also introducing more than 30 new products and services including: 

·        IBM Business Process Management Suite – expanded to include WebSphere Lombardi Edition and enhancements to WebSphere Dynamic Process Edition. 
·        IBM WebSphere Lombardi Edition V7.1 -- provides visibility and real-time control to help process owners react and adjust quickly to market pressures, regulatory changes, or other external forces.

·        WebSphere Dynamic Process Edition - new feature packs providing enhanced functionality and new capabilities to enable increased productivity and smarter insight. 
·        IBM BPM Blueprint -- a new web-based offering designed to simplify documents and processes. With little training, users can outline processes easily in such familiar tools as Microsoft PowerPoint and Word.

·        ILOG Business Rules Management for System z v7.1 -- includes easier and more comprehensive rule authoring for business users to automate the decision-making process.  Business rules govern everything from processes to decision-making and give companies analytics capabilities the help them react more quickly to changing circumstances. 
·        IBM WebSphere Commerce FEP 1 -- a customer interaction platform that allows retailers and shoppers to share information, events, wish lists, and more on social networking sites.   
·        IBM Rational Automation Framework for WebSphere (RAFW) -- provides a customizable and extensible framework to automate environment administration for the WebSphere family of products.

In the first quarter of 2010, IBM WebSphere grew 13 percent, while its integration software grew by more than 20 percent. ILOG, which plays a key role in IBM’s Smarter Planet initiative by providing business rules management, grew by more than 30 percent.   

This year’s IMPACT conference features 6,000 attendees and hundreds of client testimonials, presentations, workshops and product demos, making IMPACT 2010 the largest worldwide conference created to meet the growing demand for an educational forum around business agility.

****

Spécial Impact 2010 : IBM dévoile un nouveau "Serious game" pour relever les challenges des villes 

IBM UNVEILS NEW "SERIOUS GAME" TO TACKLE URBAN CHALLENGES 

New game to be shown at IMPACT 2010 conference

ARMONK, N.Y – May 4th , 2010 – IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced CityOne, a new "serious game" that can help customers, business partners and students discover how to make cities and their industries smarter by solving real-world business, environmental and logistical problems. Based on decades of experience in solving business challenges in creative ways, IBM “serious” games are designed to train the workforce of tomorrow. Details on the latest serious game from IBM will be unveiled on May 4, during the IMPACT 2010 conference in Las Vegas.

With an estimated 1 million people around the world moving into cities each week, experts predict population in the world’s cities will double by 2050. Today cities consume an estimated 75 percent of the world's energy, emit more than 80 percent of greenhouse gases, and lose as much as 20 percent of their water supply due to infrastructure leaks. As their urban populations continue to grow and these metrics increase, civic leaders will face an unprecedented series of challenges as they modify their infrastructures to meet these challenges. 

In order for urban centers to sustain growth and play a positive and central role in the global economy, cities must grow smart. City infrastructures that deliver vital services such as transportation, energy and water, must rely on a wealth of new information and technologies that will allow them sense and respond intelligently to the needs of their growing populations. With CityOne, IBM is providing a virtual environment that will help tomorrow’s leaders learn how to apply advances in technology and better understand how these systems work.

CityOne will be a no charge, “sim-style” game in which the player is tasked with guiding the city through a series of missions that include the Energy, Water, Banking and Retail industries. For example, one mission involves a city where water usage has increased at twice the rate of population growth, supplies are becoming strained (and possibly polluted); the municipality is losing as much as 40 percent of its water supply through leaky infrastructure; and energy costs are steadily increasing. To complete this mission, the player would be challenged to institute a Water Management System that would include accurate real time data to make decisions on delivering the highest water quality in the most economical way.

Players who promote a more customer-centric business model to the banks represented in their city will discover how mobile payments, dynamic invoicing, and micro-lending can impact business goals. In all of the missions represented in the game, the player will need to determine the best way to invest to meet the financial, environmental and sociological goals of the city’s industries while balancing their budgets and the needs of the citizenry. In parallel, players will learn how the components of service reuse, process management, cloud and collaborative technologies make business models more agile.

"Serious games allow professionals to inherently comprehend system interactions, and accurately model the potential business outcomes that can result, in a way that no other medium can do," said Nancy Pearson, IBM vice president of SOA, BPM and WebSphere. "CityOne will simulate the challenges faced in a variety of industries so that businesses can explore a variety of solutions and explore the business impact before committing resources." 

Historically, simulation gaming has been used extensively in the military, by athletes and by scientists to discover effective new strategies and techniques and develop the skills needed to implement them. These simulations have migrated into the entertainment space and spawned a new generation of what are known as massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs). In these online games, players from all over the globe log into realistic and real-time virtual worlds via the Internet; they learn different roles and skill sets, and come together in self-selecting teams to collaborate and carry out missions in pursuit of common goals. Businesses have realized the value of this and are deploying their own games to create life-like simulations of real markets, customers and business situations that they deal with every day.

"Enterprises are increasingly adopting Web 2.0 collaboration tools to appeal to a new generation entering the workforce that grew up immersed in social media technologies," said Lisa Rowan, director HR, Learning, and Talent Strategies research IDC. "Training will need to follow suit by incorporating interactivity and gaming to be relevant to this new workforce." 

IBM is not new to the serious games space. Over the years, IBM has released a number of games such as INNOV8, RoboCode and PowerUp that are used by schools, businesses, museums and conferences.  Additionally, IBM has conducted an extensive study of massive multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPGs), and the results have underscored how a rotating leadership model is likely to affect an enterprise.  Based on these results, last year IBM announced the second in the INNOV8 series of games that teach the fundamentals of Business Process Management (BPM) using a 3D environment. The INNOV8 series is now being used by more than 1000 universities worldwide and is offered for free to schools via IBM’s Academic Initiative.

Mark McGibbon, a PhD DBA professor of IT and Business at a leading university has used INNOV8 in three of his classes including Process Improvement, his Software Acquisition Class and Analytics and Simulation.

"Using serious games like INNOV8 to teach something as slippery as Business Process Management has really helped my students visualize directly the impact of these systems on a business,” said McGibbon. “We are greatly looking forward to the next IBM game." 

IBM will be unveiling the CityOne Demo in the Agility@Work Zone during the IMPACT Conference. A special session titled ‘Using Games to develop strategies and skills to thrive in a real-time world’ is part of IBM’s Executive Education Track at the upcoming IMPACT conference. Michael Hugos of the Center for Systems Innovation and Phaedra Boinodiris, IBM’s Serious Games Program manager will be presenting how  businesses can profit from simulation gaming.

For more information on IBM serious games and details on how IBM is helping clients and Business Partners to make smarter, faster decisions, please visit: http://www.ibm.com/cityone