Smarter Commerce Global Conference 2012 Madrid Maria Winans unveils new marketing models for cloud computing Episode date:

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1 Smarter Commerce Global Conference 2012 Madrid Maria Winans unveils new marketing models for cloud computing Episode date: LANINGHAM: Hello and welcome to the Smarter Commerce Global Summit in Madrid, Spain. I'm Scott Laningham, host of the developerworks podcast at IBM with my friend Todd "Turbo" Watson, IBM blogger and technology evangelist. We do these at a lot of the IBM conferences and we're on the road again in beautiful Madrid, Spain. Great to be here. Isn't it? WATSON: It's absolutely gorgeous. Viva Espana! WINANS: Same. LANINGHAM: This is fantastic. WINANS: Viva Espana! LANINGHAM: Well, this event is all about redefining business in the age of the consumer. And we are looking forward to a lot of great conversations around that focus. And our first one is with Maria Winans who is Vice President with IBM's Industry Solutions Marketing Group. Maria, good to see you again. WINANS: Good to see you. I think last time we saw each other was several years ago at, I think it was IOD. WINANS: Information on Demand. WATSON: Information on Demand in Las Vegas. WINANS: Yes. In Las Vegas I think it was. WATSON: A world away from Madrid. LANINGHAM: Was it years ago or does it just feel like years ago? WINANS: It feels like years ago. [LAUGHTER] It's been a while. LANINGHAM: You've made a wide...you've had a wide variety of leadership positions at IBM before this role with Industry Solutions. WINANS: Yes. LANINGHAM: Industry Solutions sounds so broad. How do you attack that one from the marketing standpoint? Is it as difficult and challenging as it sounds? WINANS: Well, we've been taking to market solutions in the context of an industry for years. But what's different about what we're doing now is we're really look to opportunities in the marketplace to integrate

2 our offerings, our capabilities and bring solutions to market to the line of business buyer. WINANS: So underneath the Industry Solutions Group or you can even say the Software Solutions Group, where I'd find Mike Rhodin, our strategy is focused around kind of three dimensions. It's about new solutions. So making new markets with new solutions like Smarter Commerce. It's about reaching new buyers; line of business buyers like the CMO, chief procurement officer, like the CPO. And it's about new models -- so new models on the cloud, new SAS models, software as a service. So industry solutions is the context of the division that I lead marketing for. Again, very focused on an opportunity to go make markets and go define new markets through scalable solutions. And then how do we -- scalable solutions -- how do we scale? So it's not leading transformational projects that takes years of deploying and it's one solution that's very customized. It's about how do we bring solutions to market that we can go scale across different verticals, like we're doing with Smarter Commerce. And then things like IBM Pure Systems and Smarter Travel? WINANS: Pure Systems. Smarter Cities. Social Business. Smarter Analytics. So are some of them making market plays. Again, aggregating capabilities or middleware capabilities integrating, synchronizing, bringing in new capabilities throughout positions and then bringing them to market in a consumerable way -- consumerable way which is key here -- to the line of business buyer and in a way that we could scale across different verticals, different industries. So Smarter Commerce, for example, we focused as our Tier 1 in five primary industries. It's about retail, banking, telco, consumer goods and products, and electronics. How do we take a set of consumerable solutions underneath buy, market, sell and service, Smarter Commerce, and take them to market in the context of different verticals. WATSON: Okay. WINANS: And again, paying points that we've seen through repeatable patterns in different industries. We've bundled solutions together and then put it in the context as we take it to market. WATSON: Speaking of that context. I was joking with Scott earlier today. I said the only time I ever see Maria anymore is when we're in Spain. [LAUGHTER] The last time I saw you... or one of the last times I saw you was that first seminal event in this arena, which was the Smarter Industries Symposium.

3 WINANS: In Barcelona. It was our first Smarter Industries. That was when we first launched this new division. WATSON: Yes. And I remember remarking at the time what a unique event. I was there blogging, mainly. And just the storyline was emerging. And so I kind of wanted to probe that a little bit. WINANS: Yes. WATSON: Because now here we are a year and a half later. We've got this much more structured approach. And I know that one of the things that you're critically focused on and you just mentioned is this new buyer, this line of business buyer who is often at the C level, whether it's the CIO, the CEO, the CMO, increasingly, in particular. WINANS: Right. WATSON: How is that different? And how is your organization rallying around to try to best serve the needs of that constituent? Because it's a very different buyer than our traditional IT buyer. WINANS: It's a very different buyer. And what we've been focused on... So if you look at Smarter Commerce and the way we talk about Smarter Commerce and the way that we've aggregated our solutions through organic and inorganic capabilities is we've looked at a value proposition around Smarter Commerce that says how do you integrate the value chain around commerce. And commerce is the way a business does business. It's not just commerce as a transaction online or offline or a purchase. It's really an integrated value chain that comes together. So the way that we've positioned Smarter Commerce, the way that we're taking our message and our approach to market is around buy, procurement of goods. So the buyer there is a chief procurement officer, a CPO. And acquisitions like Emptoris who have traditionally been in this space have really brought a lot of experience within that buyer that traditionally, IBM, we have not had strength around. WINANS: So that's one end of buying. When we think about market it's all about how do we bring campaigns and optimize our marketing engine to the individual? How do we segment the ability for a company to run campaign and marketing to be able to target the individual? And that includes automation. It includes integrating the marketing engine [INAUDIBLE] being much more effective. So who are we targeting there? The marketing professional and leaders like the CMO. IBM has never had a relationship with the CMO. Any time we've ever been close to a CMO they look at us and say you're in the wrong office. [LAUGHTER] The office next door is the CIO.

4 WINANS: So but... WATSON: Now we're holding the door going, wait a minute! WINANS: No. We're here to talk to you. We have something to say. But we couldn't immediately go out and say just because we're IBM we want to have a conversation. But when you have acquisitions like Unica, you have acquisitions in core metric that have been in that marketing space. We've slowly started to bring permission in the marketplace through capabilities that we've integrated to a value proposition like Smarter Commerce. Then you think about the... So we've talked about buy and market. Sell -- that sell is the transaction, online, offline. Generally we've been in that space. It's the VP of sales operations, CIOs. And a lot of our solutions are around transactions that happen on the cloud, off the cloud, online, offline. And in the service side, which is all about how do then you provide that post service that once the transaction happens, how do you keep that customer loyalty? So new professions like the customer loyalty. So when you look at the value proposition, we've been very targeted first in our solutions. Let's not go buoy on the ocean. Let's be very focused on integrating our acquisitions and bringing very focused solutions. So initially when we launched we said there's a set of 20 solutions we want to bring to market. Second, as I said before, around the industry. Five primary industries that we wanted to focus on. And then third is new buyers. We wanted to start to establish a relationship with the CMO and now with the CPO. And the CMO is a huge opportunity for us. It's a profession that's changing, that's evolving. WATSON: And we heard the average tenure today is 18 months. WINANS: 18 months. Fast. And because it's been a very difficult position. WATSON: Sure. It's the time of turbulent change. Right? WINANS: Right. And everybody has a definition of what a CMO function is. So now our strategy with that is not only target solutions into a marketing profession that's changing, but how do we help a CMO become a better leader in the new era of computing? How do we help them skill themselves to be able to bridge conversation between technology and marketing? Talk about strategy. Step out of their silos as just my marketing function. But how do I really represent a customer? The customer experience? And really look at a broader responsibility in the C suite than they've ever had before.

5 LANINGHAM: And this is part of that integration story we're talking about of de-siloing business and IT, two sides of one coin. WINANS: De-siloing. Yes. Yes. LANINGHAM: How are we doing with that conversation? Are we getting through to the CMOs? Are we getting that door open for more than a few moments and actually getting... WINANS: Well, actually we've had... Our approach to Smarter Commerce was very calculated in the way we launched. We launched it last year. You heard it here at the conference in March of last year. Shortly after that we went into the marketplace and did our first ever CMO study. Initially our thought was let's get a message out there that starts to resonate into that space. Then let's go understand that customer more. Let's understand their behavior, their responsibilities, their current skill sets, their problems, their challenges that they're seeing. And we initially had a target of over 1,000 that we could really go and have a conversation with and do the study around. We went to over 1,700 CMOs that we did personal interviews with around their challenges, their evolution as a role, their marketing organizations, their paying points. So from that we started to open up conversations with the CMO, with our sellers that have never been in front of CMOs and started to really bring a value proposition of a conversation. Not let me go sell to you and let's go...let me talk to you about the market. But really a conversation about their paying points, their roles, their leadership, what's happening in their enterprise and how IBM can partner in helping them evolve as a leader, and also partnering with them and helping their organization evolve in the new era of computing. WATSON: So maybe we can wrap up and talk just a little bit about these events themselves. WINANS: Yes. WATSON: Because you've been... WINANS: I've done many of these. WATSON:...you've been at the helm of these and they're very different. And so I was just hoping you could kind of talk about how you've crafted the strategy both for the ones we've already seen but also where we're going. All the great content. What are your objectives for these? And how do you plan to use this model moving forward?

6 WINANS: Sure. I've done... I think you and I first met at the first one we did years ago in our first ever Information on Demand that we did in Anaheim, California. What that was about was aggregating and bringing together several IT conferences that we had that were really about bringing in the IT. The discussions were about our middleware business. Developers. And aggregating conferences to really continue to develop their skill sets within IT with certifications, but also to bring that dialogue together across our middleware portfolio. What we've evolved to now is these events, like Smarter Commerce that we launched last year in San Diego was how do we start to reach the line of business buyer through a set of discussions in the context of their paying points, their industry and value proposition around more conversations around their specific needs, their journey of transformation, their journey within the enterprise. So what this conference really focuses on is that dialogue. We still run some IT discussions for the IT leaders, line of business or IT senior leaders that come in and want to have that dialogue. But what we are much more focused on is really letting our customers being the face of our story, letting our customers really tell, from their perspective, how they're seeing business outcomes, how they're seeing business value from our solutions. And bringing in much more opportunity for dialogue around business problems, business challenges. WINANS: So at this event, for instance, we have over 1,800 attendees, 70 percent, close to 80 percent are line of business C suite attendees. Where most of our middleware conferences are give or take, 40 percent to the line of business. WATSON: And speaking of which. There's another one of these in Orlando later this year. WINANS: In Orlando in September. September...the second week of September. WATSON: Smarter Commerce. WINANS: And we're going to see more of this kind of [INAUDIBLE] involved. So we are also doing our first ever CMO, CIO event in the Americas in June to really bring that C suite conversation between a line of business CMO that doesn't normally dialogue with the CIO, IT. And how do we bring that conversation between a challenge of the business to how IT can step out of their silo to bring some dialogue around a set of...how to take their enterprise to the next level?

7 WATSON: I've been trying to do that for years, as you know, within IBM. WINANS: Yes. WATSON: It's a welcomed conversation. WINANS: And it's what's happening. WATSON: Yes. WINANS: We heard it this morning. Stepping out of your silos. Conversations around the C suite, around the business, around the paying points. There are stats that say that the CMO is going to own more IT budget than the CIO in the next five years. WATSON: Wow. WINANS: Dynamics like that are... WATSON: That's a big reverse. WINANS: It's really a reverse. But it's an opportunity, whether you're a CIO, whether you're a CMO and nobody should feel threatened by that. It's just that the conversation is now going to a different level. So when you have a CMO that's owning a conversation on budgets, these conferences are about bringing those discussions to the tables as a line of business with the challenges that they have. LANINGHAM: IBM as family counseling for the business, isn't it? [LAUGHTER] WINANS: Let's sit at the table. Let's have some dialogue. Let's talk. Actually what we're finding is it's interesting because some of the relationships are good. They started at enterprises. And some of them are not. And we're helping really bridge a lot of those discussions of how you can come together and really accelerate transformation within your enterprise if you really share a conversation versus, again, working in the silos. WATSON: And Maria, for those folks who are out there listening who would like to learn more about this, I believe they can Google IBM Smarter Commerce and find out more information. They can also follow the conference hashtag from here in Madrid, IBM@SGS. WINANS: That's correct. There are many, many ways to get...to really follow the conversation. Smarter Commerce. You Google it. We're everywhere. You can go to one of our Web sites. And also we have Smarter Commerce University. Smarter Commerce domain where there is all of this. A lot of the content here will be posted. WATSON: Great.

8 LANINGHAM: There wasn't anybody in here until you came. What happened? WATSON: And now we've got... WINANS: I tell you. They knew I was here and they're all... [LAUGHTER] This is our Solutions Center. The interesting thing about the Solutions Center is it's different than the Solution Centers we've traditionally done. This is all in the context of a customer showcasing their solution. So we have a customer zone where the customer's talking about their deployments, their goal lives within their enterprise and the outcomes of their capital market. Normally it's business partners and IBM [INAUDIBLE]. So we have a whole customer zone back there. WATSON: That's a big change, as well. LANINGHAM: Then you have music, food and drink. WINANS: And you have a great time. LANINGHAM: You've got this electric atmosphere. WATSON: Scott and I are going to go try to talk to some of these folks if we can wade through the crowd. WINANS: Go through the crowd. WATSON: Thank you so much again for joining us. WINANS: No. Thank you. Thank you very much. LANINGHAM: Thank you. WINANS: Thank you. It was a pleasure. LANINGHAM: The magnetic Maria Winans that brought all of this into the room with us here. [LAUGHTER] She is Vice President with IBM's Industry Solutions Marketing Group. I'm Scott Laningham with Todd "Turbo" Watson. We'll be back with more at the Smarter Commerce Global Summit in Madrid. [END OF SEGMENT]