IBM Project Northstar was introduced today at the Portal Excellence Conference in Chicago. Conference attendees were given the opportunity to hear about IBM's vision and multi-year roadmap for how organizations can create next-generation online experiences. The focus of IBM Project Northstar is to bring together the capabilities organizations need to create and deploy exceptional Web experiences that attract and retain the best customers, improve brand loyalty, increase customer satisfaction, and lower operational costs.

Realizing the full potential of an organization's Web presence can mean any number of things... Increased customer satisfaction, heightened profitability, enhanced organizational efficiency, customer retention and acquisition. In addition, how customer's interact via one channel impacts other channels as well, requiring solutions that address multi-channel needs. Finally, creating exceptional Web experiences that are competitvely differentiated enough to dazzle, retain, and acquire new customers requires a Web platform that's both agile and insightful, combining an open and extensible foundation with additional cabilities including social and real-time communication, search, personalization, marketing tools, integration capabilities, mobile device support, real-time analytics, rich media management and more.

Read more about IBM Project Northstar at www.ibm.com/northstar.