News

Hong Kong, June 11, 2009 - IBM (NYSE: IBM) today unveiled three innovative solutions - COBRA, SWOPS and SABLE - to help businesses work smarter, and leverage a wealth of information to make more intelligent choices as they deal with emerging opportunities and risks. The solutions come at a critical time as prolonged economic uncertainty, increasingly complex supply chains and empowered consumers put enormous pressure on the decision making and risk management capabilities of Hong Kong businesses.

All three solutions were developed by IBM Research and deployed with proven success in client sites around the globe, including Kraft Foods, an international airline and organizations in the automotive manufacturing, financial services, real estate and public sectors.

Using deep analysis and insight to grow business and manage corporate reputation
Speaking at the media launch of the solutions, Vincent Wong, Partner and Hong Kong Practice Head, Global Business Services, IBM China/Hong Kong Limited said the information explosion, vocal and demanding customers and the speed and severity of the financial crisis have made it increasingly difficult for Hong Kong businesses to gain consumer insight and manage corporate reputation.

"Driving effective marketing campaigns and managing reputational risk can be extraordinarily difficult in a globally connected world where news moves fast and empowered consumers have increasing influence on issues through the use of social media such as blogs and discussion forums. Recent bailouts, business failures and layoffs have compounded this by eroding trust and making corporate reputation management a boardroom issue in Hong Kong. In some sectors, particularly financial services, the ability to restore trust and identify consumer opportunities may well determine which brands will emerge as leaders from the economic downturn," said Mr. Wong.

COBRA (Corporate Brand and Reputation Analysis) was introduced to address this challenge. With support for simplified and traditional Chinese content analysis, COBRA helps public and private sector organizations gain insight into upcoming trends in products, services and consumer preferences, and proactively manage emerging risks to their reputation by filtering and analyzing vast amounts of data and sentiment from news feeds, blogs and other social media sources, as well as internal sources such as customer complaints.

"With real time alerts and user customizable dashboard reports, organizations can identify and act on emerging trends and initial reputation risk indicators to convert them into potential opportunities," said Samson Tai, Chief Technologist, IBM Innovation Network, Hong Kong, at the launch event.

Using COBRA to monitor consumer sentiment and feedback in blogs, message boards and other social networking websites, Kraft Foods launched an innovative marketing campaign that significantly increased sales within two months and went on to become the most successful marketing campaign in its 85 year history.

Accurate forecasting helps optimize workforce management and reduce payroll costs
Volatile market conditions and fluctuating customer demand, according to Mr. Wong, have made it more difficult for Hong Kong businesses to forecast workload accurately and assign workers to shifts while optimizing their performance and productivity. This is being compounded by global supply chain disruptions and the risk of pandemic which has put more emphasis on the need for contingency planning.

Many Hong Kong businesses deal with the challenge of assigning workers to shifts through manual or semi-automatic scheduling solutions that fail to deliver accurate demand forecasting, match skills availability - a significant human capital issue in Hong Kong - or manage crisis situations such as no-shows.

The SWOPS (Shift Work Optimized Planning and Scheduling) solution launched today is a workforce management tool that uses advanced analytical capabilities for shift work scheduling and productivity optimization. Equipped with workload forecast capability, SWOPS optimizes shift work scheduling to attend to business needs while complying with labor regulations and addressing employees' constraints and preferences.

"SWOPS will help local businesses to improve service levels and customer satisfaction by staffing according to forecasted demand rather than peak load or rules of thumb, and lower their payroll related costs by reducing the number of staff required to maintain service levels," said Mr. Tai.

Using SWOPS, an international airline was able to maximize its crew utilization while complying with labor laws, and IBM's Bangalore Global Delivery Center was able to achieve substantial savings in payroll costs and schedule complex teams while adhering to complex rules and regulations.

Preventing theft and loss of business critical information
In addition, Mr. Wong pointed out the growing risk of intellectual property loss and theft to Hong Kong businesses as an increasing number of users, including employees, contractors, business partners and customers are given access to enterprise applications, services and information.

Fifteen high profile data breaches in Hong Kong over the last 12 months have illustrated the clear need for all organizations, and banks, hospitals, and insurance agencies in particular, to minimize this risk.

SABLE (System and Application Behavior Logging Engine), the third solution launched today by IBM, is a policy-based application monitoring system for Windows-based systems that addresses this issue. Being part of IBM's end-to-end enterprise security solutions, SABLE helps protect against theft and leakage of enterprise data and intellectual property by providing security policy enforcement on application execution, printing, file copying and clipboard, while monitoring user behavior for autonomic analysis and prevention of information breaches.

In particular, SABLE can detect insecure and illegal programs such as P2P software and prevent copying of business critical information to removable media such as USB thumb drives and external hard disks.

SABLE's capabilities have been proven to protect business sensitive data and intellectual property in businesses across a number of sectors, including automotive manufacturers and parts suppliers, financial services, real estate and the public sector.

All three solutions are available in Hong Kong immediately. Pricing varies according to client situations and a hosting option is available for COBRA.

"The launch of these three solutions is part of IBM's commitment to building a Smarter Hong Kong. We aim to help businesses, government and individuals leverage interconnected technologies to work smarter and unleash the power of information to gain competitive advantage, and transform themselves to emerge as leaders from the global economic crisis," Mr. Wong concluded.