The global IT industry is in the middle of an epic platform shift and the rules for survival in a market built on mobility, big data analytics, social business and cloud computing will be very different than those that applied to the previous client/server generation. That was the message from IDC Senior Vice President & Chief Analyst Frank Gens as he kicked off the research firm’s Directions 2012 conference in Boston this morning. Frank Gens (photo by Jeff Ballard via Twitter @jballard). You’ll need millions of customers in order to compete.”. today to 82 cents. MORE >>

Cognos and SPSS analytics were applied to better qualify opportunities and improve forecasting. It’s no secret that the factors that motivate salespeople to change the way they work have to be pretty simple: Help them spend more time selling and less time scrounging for information and telling managers what they’re doing. So when IBM began to introduce the concept of “social selling,” it chose a test base of a few hundred salespeople and their managers to build a set of integrated systems that improved productivity and reduced administrative overhead. MORE >>

CIThread can also tie in to Web analytics engines to fold audience behavior into its decision-making. All of a sudden, “ curation ” is one of the hottest words in the Web 2.0 world. That’s because it’s an idea that addresses a problem humans have never confronted before: too much information. In the process, it’s creating some compelling new ways to derive value from content. Content curation is about filtering the stuff that people really need from out of all the noise around it. The problem with curation is that it’s labor-intensive. More wheat, less chaff. Shhhhh! MORE >>

All this dialog has created a mountain of data and we have to figure out how to apply social analytics and who’s got the toolsets that can help us. One of my favorite CIOs is Tom Murphy , who long headed IT at AmerisourceBergen and who is now in transition to a new role (any company will be lucky to have him). Tom addressed the CIO Solutions Gallery at the Fisher College of Business at Ohio State University this morning on the subject of the role of CIOs in social media. In light of that reluctance, I found Tom’s comments particularly refreshing. It’s a cultural expertise. MORE >>

The market is too fragmented and no vendor pulls together all the necessary features, which include platforms, monitoring tools, social analytics and CRM. Software Advice has posted a grid that presents a new way of looking at the social CRM market. More importantly, Marketing Director Houston Neal argues that social CRM actually doesn’t exist. Salesforce.com probably comes the closest, Neal argues, but even Salesforce doesn’t have all the pieces in place. previously expressed my opinions about the whole concept of social CRM. Have a look at the grid and see what you think. MORE >>