IBM brought its fiscal 2011 year to a close with modest gains in both revenue and net income, the company reported Thursday.

For the quarter that ended Dec. 31, IBM reported revenue of US$29.5 billion, up 2 percent from the same quarter in the prior year. Net income was $5.5 billion, up 4 percent.

“So, 2011 was another very good year for us,” said Mark Loughridge, IBM senior vice president and chief financial officer, in an online presentation Thursday. “Our focus on key growth initiatives and investments in innovation are enabling us to expand into new markets and capitalize on trends like analytics and cloud.”

Emerging nations continue to provide growth for the company. Collectively, the revenue for Brazil, Russia, India and China increased 10 percent for the year. The Americas’ fourth quarter enjoyed an increase in revenue of 3 percent from 2010, while Asia-Pacific revenue increased 2 percent.

For fiscal 2011, IBM reported revenue of $106.9 billion, up 7 percent from fiscal 2010. Net income was also up 7 percent, to $15.9 billion. Earnings per share (EPS) for the year were $13.06, a gain of 13 percent.

With these results, the company confirmed that it was still on track to reach its goal of EPS of $20 in 2015.

However, IBM fell slightly short on analysts’ expectations. Analysts estimated that the company would bring in $29.71 billion in revenue this quarter, with $5.6 billion in net income, according to a poll by Yahoo Finance. For the year, they estimated the company would bring in $107.12 billion in revenue and $13.37 billion in earnings.

This quarter’s results once again reinforced how IBM is enjoying most of its growth from software and services, said Gartner Research Vice President Christopher Ambrose.

The Global Technology Services unit increased revenue by 3 percent this quarter, up to $10.5 billion, and the Global Business Services unit increased revenues 3 percent as well, to $4.9 billion. Revenue from the Software unit increased 9 percent, to $7.6 billion, and certain sets of software programs produced even stronger revenue growth. In this quarter, revenue for the WebSphere family of products increased 21 percent. Information Management software revenue increased by 9 percent, and Tivoli software revenue increased 14 percent. Revenues from Lotus software decreased by 2 percent.

A number of initiatives that the company has invested in over the past few years are starting to generate revenue for the company as well, including IBM’s Smarter Commerce line of e-commerce software and services, as well as its analytics software and services, Ambrose noted. Revenue from Smarter Commerce-related offerings grew by 25 percent and business analytics offerings grew by 16 percent this quarter.

Another good area of growth for the company appears to be cloud computing. Cloud computing revenue more than tripled from 2010, Loughridge said. Ambrose, however, wanted the company to reveal more about how it defines the cloud business. “What are they really calling cloud? Is it cloud services? Is it helping other companies build cloud infrastructure? What makes up for the growth?” he asked.

Not all the business units did well this quarter. Systems and Technology revenue for the quarter was down 8 percent, to $5.8 billion. The decrease actually reflects unusually strong mainframe sales in the prior year, due to the launch of the zEnterprise 196 mainframe, which boosted revenue in the fourth quarter of 2010, Loughridge said. During this time period, System Z revenue declined 31 percent and MIPS mainframe sales slipped 4 percent, compared with 2010’s fourth quarter.

In contrast, sales of IBM Power systems, also managed by Systems and Technology, grew by 6 percent for the quarter. Moreover, this sluggish quarter only slightly dampened overall yearly sales for the Systems and Technology group: The unit reported 6 percent revenue growth for all of 2011.

Source:http://www.macworld.co.uk/apple-business/news/?newsid=3331497&pagtype=allchandate

International Business Machines Corp. on Thursday reported a 4.4% increase in fourth-quarter earnings and provided strong guidance for 2012, helped by its software and services businesses.

The Armonk, N.Y., company has benefited from its push toward higher-margin, complex businesses such as business analytics, and away from crowded fields where companies only can compete on price. While that bet has been paying off, worries have emerged that the macroeconomic environment is hurting spending on technology.

While IBM on Thursday reported revenue a little lighter than analysts expected, it largely attributed the miss to currency effects. Fourth-quarter earnings, however, were better than analysts projected, as was the company’s guidance for the year.

Chief Financial Officer Mark Loughridge said IBM is “confident in our ability to leverage our business model” to grow profit, revenue and margins. For 2012, IBM projected operating earnings of at least $14.85 a share, above the $14.82 expected by analysts polled recently by Thomson Reuters.

He said that while customers are being cautious with spending, they’re “looking for value to apply to business equations.”

“That’s why, in our fourth quarter, we saw pretty good performance in our business, especially in our key investment categories and our software business,” Mr. Loughridge added.

IBM shares climbed 2.7% to $185.40 in after-hours trading Thursday. The stock has been resetting its all-time high over the past few months, with the latest coming in December at $194.90.

“These results reinforced the fact IBM has a good business model,” said ISI Group analyst Brian Marshall.

The company reported signings of $20.4 billion, down 8% from a year earlier on a constant-currency basis, but above the $12.3 billion posted for the third quarter and the consensus estimate of $20.38 billion, according to Janney Capital Markets. Meanwhile, its services backlog rose to $141 billion from $137 billion in the third quarter.

For the fourth quarter, IBM reported a profit of $5.49 billion, or $4.62 a share, up from $5.26 billion, or $4.18 a share, a year earlier. Operating earnings, which exclude retirement-plan costs and amortization, rose to $4.71 a share from $4.25 a share.

Revenue increased 1.6% to $29.5 billion; including currency fluctuations, revenue rose 1%.

Analysts recently projected earnings of $4.62 a share on revenue of $29.71 billion.

Gross margin rose to 49.9% from 49%.

IBM’s systems-and-technology unit reported a 8% decline in revenue in the period. The unit, which includes its hardware business, has been an engine for revenue growth in recent quarters because of its System Z mainframe server for large enterprises. The decline was largely due to tougher year-to-year comparisons, Mr. Loughridge said, with the fourth quarter of 2010 seeing the largest mainframe sales in IBM’s history.

Software segment revenue was up 9% as most of the company’s key products saw growth.

Revenue from technology services and business services both rose 3%.

IBM has benefited recently from its investments in growing technology sectors, such as business analytics and cloud computing. Mr. Loughridge said revenue from business analytics—which mines data to gain insight—gained 16% in 2011, while revenue from cloud computing, which allows users to access their data over the Internet, more than tripled for the year.

In the company’s growth markets, which include Brazil, Russia, India and China, revenue grew 7%, or 8% adjusted for foreign exchange.

Meanwhile, revenue in the Americas improved 3%. Total sales in Europe, the Middle East and Africa rose 1%. Total revenue in Asia increased 2%; excluding currency impacts, Asian revenue declined 1%.

Source:http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204616504577171262566740048.html

Bloomberg Vault simplifies cloud-based message archiving by taking advantage of native features unique to the IBM Lotus Domino server in order to improve security and reliability, while lowering cloud integration costs. A demo of Bloomberg Vault is available at booth #815 Tuesday and Wednesday at IBM’s Lotusphere conference in Orlando, FL.

Financial institutions are moving to hosted e-mail compliance and archiving services to deal with rising costs, risks and industry regulations, an April 2010 study by Forrester Consulting, commissioned by Bloomberg Vault, has found. Today, more than 390 financial service companies have adopted Bloomberg Vault to manage growing legal and regulatory mandates governing corporate data.

“Growing compliance requirements and an increase in digital communications is driving up the cost of compliance, archiving, and eDiscovery processes, especially for financial services firms,” said Harald Collet, Global Business Manager for Bloomberg Vault. “We designed Bloomberg Vault to integrate with IBM Lotus Domino in a secure cloud environment, so we can start to reduce unnecessary IT costs by making the message management, archiving, and compliance process much more efficient.”

Michael Waxenberg, the chief technology officer at WestLB AG, the German commercial bank, commented, “We are pleased that Bloomberg Vault supports a fully native integration with IBM Lotus Domino that can assist regulatory and e-discovery processes.”

The Bloomberg Vault solution for IBM Lotus Domino provides:

-Superior security for IBM Lotus Notes communications through support for transport-level encryption and IBM Safe ID Technology, -Automated replication, transport and reconciliation of archived message data in IBM’s NSF data format and configured via native Lotus Domino journaling features, -Message file export capabilities and specialized export template for Lotus Notes communications, Internet e-mail, Bloomberg messages and instant messaging.

“The market for cloud-based archiving services is estimated to reach over $1B in spending in 2012, and is expected to grow at a 24.8 percent compounded growth rate from 2010 to 2015,” said Laura DuBois, Program Vice President at IDC. “Companies tell us they are under a tremendous pressure to reduce the cost of compliance, and Bloomberg Vault’s Lotus Notes support offers companies an uncomplicated solution that also helps to reduce IT costs.”

Source:http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-17/bloomberg-vault-adds-cloud-archiving-for-ibm-message-software.html

IBM announced that appliance maker Electrolux is using IBM social software to connect its workforce in 60 countries and encourage a deeper level of innovation and knowledge sharing.

At its Lotusphere 2012 conference here, IBM announced that Electrolux is using Big Blue’s IBM Connections and IBM Sametime software to connect its employees in the company’s growing community and to help them collaborate on projects with others spread around the world.

“Social business is enabling companies to scale in new ways and drive greater innovation within their organization,” Alistair Rennie, general manager of Social Business at IBM, said in a statement. “Organizations can seamlessly connect and share information across a global network of clients, partners and employees through the power of social business.”

Using IBM’s social software, Electrolux employees in the office or on the go can find experts and gain valuable insight from the data on their company’s intranet portal, IBM Connections social networking platform and IBM Sametime instant messaging software.

Working with business partners Infoware Solutions and Avantime, Electrolux has seen the number of internal online communities, networks and microblogs grow rapidly, the company said. The intranet, powered by IBM Connections and Microsoft SharePoint, contains more than 100 information portals managed by more than 450 editors, and has 15,000 monthly and 9,000 daily readers. There are more than 1,100 collaboration spaces with 8,500 members, Electrolux said.

Electrolux employees are using IBM Connections microblogging to quickly spread information across the organization, including new-product and customer care ideas, and strategic organizational announcements.

In addition, Electrolux employees will also have access to a social-collaboration dashboard. Through integrating IBM Lotus Notes email and IBM Sametime instant messaging, employees will be able to drag an email into a Connections Activity and discuss with colleagues in that specific window. This will help to better engage the team, provide a more comprehensive overview of the project and reduce attachments in the email inbox, the company said.

“Our goal is to empower our employees so they have access to content and collaboration tools anytime and from anywhere,” Ralf Larsson, director of online employee engagement and development at Electrolux, said in a statement. “Working with IBM, our employees are now becoming better engaged and more connected into specific business processes that help them expand the scope of product innovation.”

Source:http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Enterprise-Applications/Electrolux-Taps-IBM-for-Social-Software-531447/

Your job comes with a web of security permissions that an IT department has to regulate. IBM‘s newest security software, however, knows what role you have and can assign access before the IT guys ever have to lift a finger.

A lot of companies use software that limits what an individual employee can do on the computer. Some classes of employees, such as sales people, are allowed access to different applications, software, and social media that others are not. This is especially true in larger organizations where confidential information is distributed on a need-to-know basis, and can slip outside of company firewalls without this the right security software. The problem is that as a company grows larger, tailoring security for individual employees can become tedious.

IBM has developed identity software that takes care of this problem. The software, which is called Security Role and Policy Modeler, looks at your existing applications and detects how many permissions each person has. These applications include Salesforce, Oracle Finance, Active Directory and more. Based on the access permissions certain employees have in these applications, Security Role and Policy Modeler will group employees into “roles” and assign them a blanket permissions scheme, which can be edited manually. The roles aren’t based necessarily on what job you have, just on what permissions already exist for you, and how they are similar to other people in the company.

But not everyone is the same, right? Well, from a security standpoint, your 10,000 person company may be filled with individuals, but it costs a lot of money to sort them one by one. For IBM, it makes more sense to divvy them up into groups and then, if necessary, manually tweak permissions, also known as, “roles plus.”

“Having roles well defined will get the compliance auditor off your back faster,” said IBM Security Systems vice president of strategy and product development Marc van Zadelhoff in an interview with VentureBeat.

Industries such as finance and medical have compliance regulations around communications and security that are often audited for updated practices. This can be sloppy if your permissions are spread across a number of different applications, especially when a compliance officer wants to see order. Van Zandelhoff believes the role creating software is a way to bring calm to the chaos.

For Van Zandelhoff, the new software is also a testament to IBM. The product was born out of IBMs newest division, Security Systems, and is meant to show what Van Zandelhoff calls “good ol’ fashion organic innovation.” The company announced this morning that it acquired 6180 patents in 2011, and won the most patents received in a year for the 19th year. While this and company acquisitions are what IBM is known for, the Security Systems team wants to change that with internal inventions.

Ironically, the department has acquired 12 companies thus far, but doesn’t want to limit itself.

“We announced IBM Security Systems in October,” said Van Zandelhoff, “It’s the culmination of security growing to become quite a sizeable business.”

Source:http://venturebeat.com/2012/01/11/ibm-security-software/

IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced today that BodyMedia, Inc., a leader in wearable body monitors designed for health and wellness, is using IBM software to help consumers more easily achieve their weight-loss goals. Powered by IBM software, the new personalized feedback capabilities in the BodyMedia FIT body monitoring system now provide users with their own fitness coach.

Historically, fitness devices have tracked data, but not offered advice on what to do next. However, personalized feedback can help improve the success of consumers’ weight loss plans. The use of technology for fitness is a business that is growing rapidly. In fact, 37 percent of those surveyed had planned to purchase a fitness technology device in the next 12 months, while almost half of all people that work out use technology to enhance their efforts already.*

“Our BodyMedia FIT Armbands have tracked calorie burn for hundreds of thousands of people trying to lose weight, but we wanted to also help consumers understand how all of this data could effect their fitness goals,” said Christine Robins, CEO, BodyMedia. “By using IBM’s software, the new system now provides daily advice tailored to each user’s specific activities, food consumption and weight loss goals to keep them on track.”

Using both historical and current BodyMedia data, as well as user input, the feedback engine tracks each user’s daily calorie burn, food intake and sleep patterns, and then compares the results to their weight loss goals. By being able to analyze this fitness data, the new technology helps users make sense of this information and provides personalized feedback to help them stay on top of their fitness objectives.

For instance, if a user slept too little, was not active enough, and ate several meals that are high in fat, the device will offer tips and advice on what types of activities must be done to still meet their weight loss target.

BodyMedia teamed up with Pittsburgh, Pa.-based IBM Business Partner Summa to develop the new FIT Coach component. By applying IBM WebSphere Operational Decision Management (WODM) software to the millions of data points collected by BodyMedia on-body Armbands, Summa was able to create the business rules required to run the system.

The IBM Decision Management platform powers the armband’s feedback engine. It is then able to make all the necessary calculations to assess the users’ current status and compare it to their long-term goals. The rules defined in the system then determine all of the possible feedback that can be provided, while analyzing, selecting and filtering the most relevant feedback and suggestions to display in the BodyMedia FIT Activity Manager.

The Activity Manager application works in tandem with the BodyMedia FIT Armband, which uses a proprietary four-sensor system to track calories burned, steps taken, level of physical activity and sleep patterns that affect health and weight at a rate of 5,000 data points per minute. The Activity Manager software analyzes and stores that data and allows users to set individualized activity goals and document daily food intake. Now, it also provides IBM-powered personalized feedback based on user activity.

“As the marriage of fitness and technology becomes more and more pervasive, we continue to see companies rely on software to distinguish their products in a crowded marketplace,” said Bruce Anderson, general manager, Global Electronics Industry, IBM. “With the help of IBM analytics, BodyMedia has been able to provide users with the insight to make sense of all the information they’ve been tracking and turn it into actionable progress towards their weight loss objectives. This is providing their clients with a fitness experience that no other company can offer.”

The new FIT coach will become a standard feature with all BodyMedia FIT Activity Manager subscriptions later this year. The feedback engine can also be customized for partners and has already been incorporated into the Activity Manager portion of the Jillian Michaels 360 degree Weight Loss Navigator, a weight loss support program by the celebrity fitness trainer that incorporated the entire BodyMedia system.

Originally developed to help businesses and organizations streamline their day to day operations, IBM Decision Management provides personalized services for clients across a wide range of industries, including fitness (Athletes Performance), airlines (British Airways), finance (VISA Europe), manufacturing (Caterpillar) and retail (Yves Rocher).

Source:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/bodymedia-selects-ibm-software-to-personalize-weight-loss-advice-137070453.html