IBM will offer its business-focused Connections social networking platform as a free application on Android, Blackberry, and Apple smartphones as well as tablet devices. With Connections, users can share files, photos, blog posts, and “status” updates with business colleagues.
Connections (formerly Lotus Connections) was recently cited in a report from Forrester Research as being one of the top four social applications for enterprises and, according to IDC, the leader by market-share.
"IBM has forgotten about making the device themselves and now just pushes the software," Rob Enderle, lead analyst of the Enderle Group, noted.
On Apple’s iOS, IBM provides a unique tool that allows IT administrators to perform a “partial wipe” of devices, removing or altering company data while preserving the employee’s personal data. An employee could blog about a recent marketing initiative while the network administrator makes technical and data changes to her Connections account in the background.
This tool is not available for the Blackberry and Android versions of Connections.
With the wide array of social networking applications people use in their private lives – such as Facebook, Google Plus and Twitter – IBM will face challenges in maintaining the partitions between what is shared for personal and work reasons.
According to Enderle, the ideal scenario for everyone would be a firewall-separated integration with the non-enterprise social networking giants. “But the young company, old company partnerships seldom work in these sorts of integrations.”
Jive, Telligent and NewsGator all compete with IBM in this space and are much younger companies.
