Monica Nguyen Blog #4

The Target is You: IBM Smarter Planet Update

IBM Smarter Planet wants to raise awareness on how cloud is changing business culture and strategy through social media. 

Yesterday, on their Facebook, IBM posted a graphic asking people if cloud changed the way they worked. As you can see below, they replied back to a commenter that said cloud changed the way they worked with the comment "Feel free to share examples of how cloud has impacted the way you work" which shows that they take the time to read over comments. 

Another commenter said that the OS they use is not the one present in their machines and it is a VM, hosted by a remote server at the client location, which IBM then "liked." 

The infographic pictured is titled: How Developers Work In The Cloud

For developers cloud means being able to share resources and ideas between teams, and build applications fast enough to keep up with the new pace of business. 

Before cloud, developers would spend weeks waiting for access to the right computing resources and upgrading their development tools to create applications. Collaboration was never easy. And performance testing was difficult and time-consuming. 

With cloud, developers can collaborate in new ways. They can also build, test and deploy applications faster without having to worry about infrastructure. This is true whether the service is provided by a third party or part of a team's own data center. 

They also posted a tweet about an article written by Rishi Sanjay, Managing Partner, Cloud Consulting Services. He writes about his personal experience and how with the convergence of mobile, social and analytic technologies, organizations simultaneously face their greatest challenge, and their greatest opportunities. And among the crowd of technologies, cloud computing is fundamentally changing the landscape of business and IT, and represents a transformation as profound as that created by our smart phones over the last handful of years. 

Also over the past day every few hours, they tweeted to promote a chat ( #P4SPchat ) to discuss Social Business on Oct 10 at Noon. 

These are a few examples of their tweets but there are plenty more on their twitter feed. It was smart of them to ensure they are on the top of their followers' news feeds so they keep posting the same tweet frequently.

Current Event

A perfect segway from discussing the tech industry is the recent backlash Twitter has been receiving. Yesterday PR Daily discussed how The New York Times called out Twitter for its lack of female leadership. "The board? All white men. The investors? All men. The executive officers? All men but for the general counsel, Vijaya Gadde, who has had the job for five weeks." 

The story goes on to suggest that Twitter and other Silicon Valley tech companies are “unwelcoming to women.” It also includes comments from Vivek Wadhwa of Stanford’s corporate governance program, who’s quoted as saying: “It’s the same male chauvinistic thinking. The fact that they went to the IPO without a single woman on the board, how dare they?” 

This is an important issue to me because I am a female that is hoping to enter the Tech industry which I know is predominately male. PR Daily said "Experts point to a lack of female candidates in the industry as the reason why there are so few female execs at top tech firms." 

Twitter initially declined to comment on the NYT story, but Twitter CEO Dick Costolo tried to make light of the situation with this tweet: 

And then he made it worse: 

However, AllThingsD reports that “the company has placed a top priority on adding a woman to the current all-male roster, according to sources close to the situation, as well as hiring a search firm to gin up names of candidates.”