One of the largest advantages offered by SaaS, IBM’s new SaaS study found, is the increase in collaboration it can support both inside an organization and outside, with its supply chain partners. IBM’s collaboration tools, on the IBM Connections platform, including a new, sophisticated e-mail system announced at IBM Connect 2014 last week, chat, meetings, office productivity, and content capabilities, are among the most popular of its 100+ SaaS offerings running on SoftLayer, said Ramsy Prior, program director for IBM’s Social Business Cloud. In 2013 IBM was named the leading provider of enterprise social software for the fourth consecutive year by IDC. Today 75 percent of the Fortune 100 use IBM enterprise social software and services.

“Increasingly the hub of all business activity goes beyond email and includes social networking, online meetings, communities and social document editing, and we do the whole gamut,” Prior said. “These are tools that people use from the time they wake up in the morning until the time they go to bed, and we’ve built extensibility into the platform for pre-integrated ISE solutions including things like CRM. We have over 100 ISE partners who are working on extending that collaboration platform because it is an easy hub and place to start.”

Prior said the Smart Cloud for Social Business has seen “an incredible surge in momentum in new customers”, which IBM believes is the start of a very strong growth year for its SaaS and larger cloud service portfolio. These new customers are looking for ways to expand into new territories quickly, modernize their communications tools and “upgrade from tools that were poorly equipped to handle social, working socially and working with dispersed teams and over time zones.”

For instance Princess Cruise Lines discovered that the IBM Connections platform fostered a more team-oriented environment and generated more innovative thinking throughout its organization. While Princess originally moved to SaaS mainly as a cost saving initiative, it now uses Connections as a competitive differentiator in the market based on superior customer service, a net effect of a more connected workforce.

Rapid pace of development

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IBM has also added 29 new partners that are certified to help customers on-board its SaaS collaboration tools. IBM is working with its strong partner ecosystem to alleviate customer pain-points. “We delivered over 2,250 capabilities last year, and we’re on a rapid pace already this year with new releases,” Prior said.

IBM’s new Mail Next platform, scheduled for introduction this year, provides advanced, intelligent tools to help people manage the onslaught of e-mail. “You can filter out the information that is not urgent to focus on topics and people who are. We built analytics into it to help identify trending topics and people that matter to you,” Prior said. It supports offline replication and has a tablet design-point to serve the growing population of business people who use their tablets as their primary e-mail device. That tablet design base-point is carried over to users who access their e-mail through a browser “because it’s elegant, and it takes a lot of the clutter out and focuses on ease-of-use and getting through your inbox more quickly.”

“Many large enterprises are moving mail to cloud – not just SMBs – primarily to achieve cost and maintenance reduction as well as to offload complexity associated with the proliferation of mobile and tablet devices and platforms among their users,” said Kramer Reeves, director of Messaging and Collaboration Systems. “Mail Next targets the needs of large enterprises, but the SaaS model allows SMBs to have the same capabilities, security, and reliability previously accessible only to enterprise customers. There are no minimum purchases, and IBM has a healthy mix of SMB and enterprise customers using SmartCloud mail and collaboration offerings.”

IBM has integrated Domino so that its Notes customers can bring their custom e-mail applications with them to the new platform. IBM also has announced a partnership with Parallels to co-develop a plug-in that allow telcos and other large resellers to access a unified DSS layer. That allows them to integrate multiple cloud services and combine IBM SaaS offerings with services from other providers.

Big data analysis

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IBM plans to introduce new SaaS and other cloud products throughout the year, says Rick Telford, VP of IBM Cloud Services. “Our recent investment in cloud, coupled with new SaaS products that we announced recently and will announce throughout the year, show that IBM is betting on cloud as a high growth area.”

IBM’s SaaS offerings include predictive analytics-driven applications that run large quantities of raw data through a modeling sequence to deliver information to drive business decisions in several verticals. One example that Telford cited is in retail merchandising, designed to drive pricing/promotion/assortment optimization decisions.

One group of SaaS applications for retail and CPG manufacturers, including the IBM DemandTec suite, ingest raw point-of-sale data, layer a modeling sequence on top of that data, and provide a business users with the ability to run sophisticated what-if analyses and predictions, all in the cloud. IBM Algorithmics provides risk-management analytics for the financial services industry.