IBM Connections wins at Bayer

by Volker Weber

Bayer is one of Microsoft's largest wins. The company, a long time IBM customer, is moving to the Microsoft stack. Then last year, Bayer Material Science (BMS), a small part of Bayer, started to roll out IBM Connections, joint press release with IBM, the full treatment.

As you can imagine, that lead to some discussion within Bayer. Sharepoint MySite vs. Connections. Since the strategy was to go on a Microsoft stack, the smaller renegade BMS was set up for failure. Only they did not.

I just learned last week that Connections won. It's going to be a full rollout across the whole company. And I have a follow-up post on how I would deliver Project Vulcan. As you can imagine, it involves Connections.

Comments

Connections is awesome. I'm glad that the decision was made on substance.

I would be curious to know how much the name "Lotus" popped up, or if this was a pure IBM pitch. I'm guessing the latter.

Erik Brooks, 2011-08-04

That is incredibly good news!

Think how much Connections IBM could sell if they actually told people about it.

---* Bill

Bill Buchan, 2011-08-04

@Bill, yeah, seems like at Bayer the internal department needed to do the marketing about it, LOL.

Michael Kobrowski, 2011-08-04

Congrats to the IBM team, that sounds like an excellent win.

Alan Lepofsky, 2011-08-04

Maybe MySite isn't all that hot after all. I'll admit that I was *very* surprised when I heard about that latest decision.

Joerg Michael, 2011-08-04

I'd be interested to "hear" why they went that route. We're in the process of putting up a SharePoint site. Not always the most intuitive package...

John Maguire, 2011-08-05

I believe there were some features missing from Sharepoint that they needed. In the end this becomes a political discussion, where vendors get "punished" in what likes like a random decision. You can always do the same things in different ways. Often IBM loses. But not this time.

Volker Weber, 2011-08-05

Hello, could you share some more information about this great win?

Thanks

Lidia Vikulova, 2011-08-08

BMS; the renegate represents 30% of Bayer's turnover. They started with Connections 2 years ago. With the upgrade to version 3 some press releases were made together with IBM.

The decision to go for Connections for the whole of Bayer was based on what would create most value for our users. We looked at various options and then decided.

Connections is already fully integrated into Outlook, into Office 2010 and we are in the process of finalizing the Sharepoint integration.

Kurt De Ruwe, 2011-08-09

Volker: I am an IBMer -- and I am so happy for your decision! We are here for you as you deploy tecnically and on Adoption Best Practices!

Let me anything you need!!!

Sandy, IBM VP, Social Business Evangelism

Sandy Carter, 2011-08-12

Thank You Volker for providing this information. There are more MS Shops in the queue for IBM Connections.

Ciao Marco

Marco Foellmer, 2011-08-13

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