IBM signs social software deal with Polaris

IBM today said that leading Indian provider of financial technology for BFSI segment,  Polaris Financial Technology Ltd, had selected the IBM Octopus social software to provide employees with a superior digital experience, improve workforce productivity and accelerate business growth.

By adopting IBM's leading enterprise social collaboration platform, Polaris is transforming how its 12,500 employees connect, communicate and collaborate to drive greater workforce productivity, Big Blue said. 

Instead of relying solely on email to drive essential business tasks and project coordination, the new platform allows Polaris FT to leverage the collective knowledge of every employee to fuel new innovation, ideation and future business growth.  This includes a significant reduction in the time it takes to on-board employees new to the company.                                                                                                       

"Working with IBM, Polaris designed and developed Octopus, an enterprise social platform that runs on IBM Connections and uses APIs provided in the IBM Social Business Toolkit," IBM said.

This application makes it easy for IBM partners and clients like Polaris to build an entirely new class of cloud-based social business applications for their businesses using the Connections foundation. With Octopus, Polaris is able to apply social networking, social learning, digital experiences and knowledge/content management tools based on an open cloud-based, mobile architecture. 

''Octopus has enabled our company to better understand the role between employee engagement and business performance. Equipping our workforce with an effective social collaboration platform has created a more flexible working environment and helped to improve communication within the organisation and with our customers,'' said Shashi Mohan, CTO & CIO, Polaris Financial Technology.

''In fact, this effect can be quantified. Our analysis has shown that Octopus has ushered an 8-per cent reduction in effort, lowered attrition by 4 per cent and has reduced on-boarding time by a whopping 75 per cent,'' Mohan added.

Octopus manages all project deliveries, customer related interactions, knowledge-sharing, online collaboration and employee engagements taking place across the business – a transformation that has helped increase total enterprise productivity.

Through the 360-degree view and central information storage that Octopus enables, Polaris is no longer solely reliant on email to record, deliver and collaborate on projects and has improved the way it communicates and engages with customers.

Adoption of social business solutions continues to soar as organisations around the globe look to transform into smarter, more connected and empowered enterprises.

''Organisations around the globe continue to look for ways to create a smarter enterprise that connects customers, employees, business partners and other key stakeholders to share ideas, spur innovation, improve performance and outpace the competition,'' said Anmol Nautiyal, director, IBM Social Business & Smarter Workforce, India/South Asia.

''Time and time again, the answer continues to be social technologies. Whether delivered on-premise or in the cloud, social allows businesses to drive strong teaming both inside and outside the organization which in the end leads to strong collaboration and workforce productivity,'' Nautiyal said.

Deploying a secure and highly customsable enterprise social platform allows companies like Polaris to create a flexible environment that is able to capture valuable insights and more easily engage all key stakeholders – employees, customers, partners and suppliers – to accelerate innovation and deliver results.