Podcast: What Is IBM Doing To Fight The Growing Skills Gap

In response to the growing technical skills gap revealed by IBM’s 2012 Tech Trends study, and to help professionals and students learn more about cyber security best practices, IBM rolled out the largest expansion of its Academic Initiative to date earlier this month. For the first time, IBM will offer access to pre-packaged curriculum and training resources on IT security, helping students understand enterprise challenges, do in-depth analysis of trends uncovered in the IBM X-Force report, and gain market-ready cyber security skills.

Check out this podcast to hear Dan Hauenstein, a global lead on IBM’s skills programs, discuss how these new initiatives in cyber security and other advanced technologies will help to solve the global skills epidemic. http://bit.ly/XK6uiF

Are You on the Fast Track? New Tech Trends Study Out Now

The latest Tech Trends study is here! Check out the report, interactive infographic and videos involved with this year’s study.

For 2012, IBM delved deeper into four technologies that dominated last year’s results: mobile, analytics, cloud, and social business. To fuel the research, IBM developerWorks collaborated with the IBM Center for Applied Insights (CAI) to analyze survey responses from more than 1,200 professionals who make technology decisions for their organizations – IT managers, business professionals and IT practitioners from 16 different industries and 13 countries.

To read about adoption rates, investment levels and how elite organizations are outpacing their competitors, download the study report: Fast track to the future (.PDF, 2KB).

You can also:

• Watch this featured video: who’s winning the tech race?

• Explore the interactive infographic  to learn what’s happening both globally and in your part of the world.
• Download the survey source data to discover your own insights (SPSS SAV, 123KB).

Leading Marketers: Unleash the Power of Smarter Analytics

In this issue:

• Marketing Analytics – Developing insights that drive business outcomes
• We want to know
• Around IBM
• Milestone reached – thank you!

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Marketing Analytics – Developing insights that drive business outcomes

Marketers: every day, the amount of data available to you grows―and it’s arriving faster than ever. It’s a rich resource, including information about rivals, markets, segments, even individual customers. But to tap this powerful source of competitive advantage and to uncover insights, marketers need a structured approach.

Marketing analytics lays the groundwork for smarter decisions, successful campaigns, and strengthened customer relationships. It’s the foundation that enables marketers to engage customers as individuals in every interaction across every channel.

A new study from the IBM Center for Applied Insights shows how leading marketers – who are today making 2x the profit of their peers – are making it happen. Read it here: http://bit.ly/mrktinganalytics

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We want to know

It’s your turn – of the MANY social networks in use today, which do you use most? Is it the major players like Facebook for social life, LinkedIn for business networking? Or are you a Pinterest person or a Google+ sharer? Let us know by voting here – we want to hear from you!

http://greateribm.wordpress.com/2012/09/10/what-social-network-do-you-use-the-most/

We’ll publish the results next week.

And don’t forget that you can always post your own question under the Discussions tab here at LinkedIn.

Get a conversation going today – you have about 75,000 of your fellow Greater IBMers to talk to.

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Around IBM

A lot of Greater IBMers have told us that after they leave the company, one thing they miss is knowing what’s going on around the world at IBM. Here’s a roundup of some of the latest:

Innovation: Polycom teams with IBM Research on cloud/video capabilities http://greateribm.wordpress.com/2012/09/12/polycom-teams-with-ibm-research-on-cloudvideo-capabilities/

International:

• IBM Mexico in the spotlight as IBM opens Smarter Data center in Guadalajara City: http://greateribm.wordpress.com/2012/09/05/1202/
• Mainframe making good in Africa with IBM Business Partner CFAO Technologies: (with infographic): http://greateribm.wordpress.com/2012/08/29/the-mainframe-making-good-in-africa-with-ibm-business-partner-cfao/

Excellence in IT: Do YOU have what it takes to be an IBM Champion? Nominations are open now – details here: bit.ly/P8KMob

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Milestone – thank you!

Thanks again for helping us reach our latest milestone of 10,000 Likes on The Greater IBM Connection’s Facebook page. We look forward to reaching many more of these milestones with you!

Be sure to tell your Greater IBM friends and colleagues to Like our page, too: https://www.facebook.com/GreaterIBM