IBM to invest $100 million in mobile communication research

NEW DELHI, INDIA: IBM today announced it plans to shift $100 million investment over the next five years into a major research effort, which aims to advance mobile services and capabilities for businesses and consumers worldwide.

IBM is investing to create technology in its labs that bring simple, easy-to-use services to the millions of people who have bypassed using the personal computer as their primary method of accessing the Internet, and instead use their mobile devices for managing large forces of enterprise field workers, conducting financial transactions, entertainment, shopping, and more.

Through this effort, IBM is aiming to drive new intelligence into the underpinnings of the mobile web to create new efficiencies in business operations and people’s daily lives. The three focus areas for IBM’s research investment are: emerging market mobility, mobile enterprise enablement, and enterprise end-user mobile experiences. Analytics, security, privacy and user interface, and navigation will be concentrated on across the Research effort.

“In today’s interconnected world, mobile device are gradually becoming ubiquitous and helping us transcend many boundaries -– geographical, economic, and social, among others," says Dr. Guruduth Banavar, director of IBM Research -- India and global leader of the IBM Research mobile communication initiative. "With high penetration, simple user interface, and significant cost advantage for end users, mobile telephony holds the future of communication and exchange of information for the enterprise.”

Emerging market mobility
For the 83 percent of the world that does not have easy access to the Web since via PCs, IBM is helping mobile phone users become more productive. In these locations, there is a dearth of skills, such as technological and language literacy; a lack of infrastructure, such as reliable electrical power; as well as limited availability of smartphones.

In one such project, IBM Research – India has established a pilot program that allows people, including farmers, repairmen, small business owners, and consumers, to post, retrieve or exchange timely information via voice on cellphones.

Content –- such as weather and ocean conditions, grain prices, advertisements, bus schedules, news, class schedules, product catalogues, health information and available services appointments –- is created and updated by entrepreneurs and municipalities.

Mobile enterprise enablement
Low cost, high bandwidth, wireless access, and PC-like information processing power are accelerating the promise of the mobile phone as a compelling platform for accessing information services. Mobile phones now outnumber traditional telephones, and the opportunities for growth in mobility are enormous.

According to IBM's Institute for Business Value, the number of mobile users will have grown by 191 percent from 2006 to 2011 to reach approximately one billion users.

A glimpse of the possibilities of mobility can be found in a recent pilot performed as part of IBM’s first-of-a-kind (FOAK) program which used a technology titled “BlueStar” to develop automated mobile devices and application management services for insurance claims processing.

The pilot enabled an insurance enterprise to significantly reduce the amount of time required to process claims by leveraging mobile technology to locate and dispatch the most appropriate and available claims adjusters for each case. IBM’s FOAK program pairs IBM's scientists with clients to explore how emerging technologies can solve real world business problems.

Enterprise to end-user mobile experience
“Mobility and the associated analytics will change virtually every enterprise business process,” said Paul Bloom, chief technology officer, IBM Telecom Research. “It will change the relationship between enterprises and their customers, their employees and their partners.”

One example of how mobility will change the relationship between enterprises and the end user can be found in a project at IBM’s Haifa Research Laboratory with Taiwan Mobile, the second largest telecom company in Taiwan. Here, IBM is analyzing customer information to get manageable business intelligence based on evolving user preferences, users context and transaction history.

IBM Research comprises approximately 3,000 scientists in eight major laboratories around the globe. IBM also has more than 20,000 software developers in 75 development labs in 18 countries. IBM has earned the most US patents for 16 consecutive years, and five of its researchers have been the recipients of the Nobel Prize.