Big Blue lightens up

CAMBRIDGE -- IBM Corp., shedding its staid corporate persona, is deploying blogs, wikis, and other consumer Internet technology to boost its standing on business desktops.

The company known as Big Blue, the color of its mainframes and the suits that defined its dress code a generation ago, has been laboring at its labs here to harness social networking tools popularized by college kids in wrinkled shirts pecking away on wireless laptops.

This month , the company unveiled more than a dozen innovations developed by IBM Labs, many here at a former research site of Lotus Development Corp., acquired by IBM in 1995. They include new "social software" influenced by Internet environments like MySpace and Second Life. Some are aimed at enhancing future versions of IBM's flagship e-mail program, Lotus Notes, and blunting the move of upstarts like Google Inc. into enterprise software.

The new social networking products reflect the growing importance to IBM of software, which now represents about 40 percent of company revenue, and of Massachusetts, where IBM has acquired nine software companies in the past decade and now employs about 5,000 people, most in software development.

IBM is stopping short of entering the consumer market, however. Steven A. Mills , the IBM senior vice president and software group executive, said the new products are strictly for businesses.

"There is a level of industrial strength that's demanded in business," Mills said. "There's a very different and distinct set of characteristics for these kinds of technologies in business as compared to the stateless public Internet. We can't confuse these things."

IBM has been a pioneer in collaborative technologies, such as e-mail and instant messaging, through its ubiquitous Lotus suite and Sametime applications. But its new generation of products are "maniacally focused on end users" rather than data center employees, Alistair Rennie , Lotus vice president of development and technical support, said. The goal is to get employees to use the kinds of interfaces they're comfortable with in their personal lives to be more productive at work.

One example is Lotus Connections, previewed at the company's Lotusphere conference in January. It lets employees form in-house communities, including partners and customers as well as co-workers, sharing expertise through blogging and posting on internal portals profiles akin to those on MySpace, including bookmarks of useful sites.

Many Eyes, a data-sharing application, enables groups of users in an organization to upload charts, known as visualizations, from a variety of websites using common programs like spreadsheets in order to create and manipulate views and search for data subsets. Another application, Live Book, integrates instant messaging with wiki technology to create shared documents updated in real time.

"Our thesis is that all data should be up to date all the time," said IBM master inventor Robert A. Flavin , computer science manager at the company's Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y. "It should be able to be shared synchronously and asynchronously. And there should be fine-grained access control."

Other offerings include Innovation Factory, which lets businesses use Internet tools from IBM to rapidly conceive and test products; PodSmart, an application enabling employees to create personal radio broadcasts; and, Desktop Widgets, a framework for letting office workers combine Internet technologies, including some from third parties, to accomplish tasks.

The initiatives represent an ambitious bid by IBM to become a leader in importing social networking into the workplace, said Jackie Fenn , vice president and research fellow at Gartner Inc. in Medford. "There are a lot of viral sites out there, and many of the people who use MySpace or Facebook live in those worlds," she said. "Technologies like Lotus Connections are going to be very important in bringing these technologies into the enterprise."

Frank Gens , senior vice president for research at Framingham's International Data Corp., said IBM might be missing an opportunity, however. While its new social software could improve IBM's image with a new generation of tech-savvy employees, Gens warned that the company is ignoring consumers in an era when the line between consumer and enterprise technologies is blurring.

"It's hard to see how you can be successful in these consumer-oriented technologies for the enterprise if you're not also in the consumer market," Gens said. "Nothing's going to stop the guys who are already developing for the consumer market from stepping into the business market. IBM can't afford to follow these guys."

Indeed, one of the largest consumer Internet companies, search provider Google, rolled out a web-based product called Google Apps Premier Edition, this winter specifically to compete with companies like IBM and Microsoft Corp. on business desktops.

In a January speech to the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council, Google's general manager for enterprise, Dave Girouard , predicted future generations of enterprise software will take their cue from the consumer Internet, stressing simplicity and ease of use. "There's been an artificial wall between consumer technology and enterprise technology," he said, "and it's starting to crumble."

Robert Weisman can be reached at weisman@globe.com.