IBM Aims to Help Users Get Their Data Together

With the skyrocketing use of blogs, wikis and other online avenues, many businesses are beginning to use e-mail and the Web as a bellwether for measuring the success of their products. Blogs, for example, have been shown to generate buzz about new products and bring bad publicity to faulty merchandise and misleading marketing. Enterprises would like to use this online buzz as part of their market intelligence, but the wide variety of data makes it difficult to collect it all in one place.

IBM's solution comes at a good time for business. A tool that merges online information sources also can help a company's internal operations. Blogs and wikis disseminate information and create discussions in ways that were not possible before. Project managers can use a blog to inform employees of current project status. By pulling the data together, IBM could help enterprises improve their overall productivity.