IBM moved 350,000 employees to remote work in three days during the pandemic. The company integrated Salesforce Customer360 with Slack to handle collaboration and security challenges, creating what speakers call a single source of truth for customer-facing teams.
350,000 IBMers (pivoted in a three-day period).
We've been in this mode of the industrial age for the last 200 years. You went to a place because that's where the energy was, that's where the power was. Power from water wheels or electricity or steam, it was in the plant. So you went there. We've kind of mentally followed that path for 200 years without thinking. When people talk about the nature of work, well, the nature of work may not change, but the nature of how we do work and where we do work I believe is fundamentally going to change.
When the pandemic hit and the world was looking at shutdowns, much of what was happening within IBM remained steady. And I do believe a lot of that has to do with Salesforce Customer360.
We, in a three day time period pivoted 350,000 IBMers from our offices around the world to a work from home environment and boom.
Do we have the VPN capacity? Do we have the cybersecurity? Do we have the collaboration tools? Any company who thinks they can do it all by themselves is plain wrong. Salesforce is a really important pillar of IBM's own transformation.
We are moving our entire structure toward what's happening at the client conversation because this is about understanding our customer. Combining Salesforce, Customer360 and Slack gives my entire workforce, from Arvind all the way through, someone stepping into a sales role for the first day, an ability to work together, collaborate and do it real time.
Allowing teams to serve our clients and all be on the same page every day would not have happened if we did not have Slack.
Slack is such an integral part of how all our people communicate.
And the merger of these two platforms gives us that 360 approach across our entire constituency. And most importantly, it gives us one single source of truth. This is a big change for us in our company.
This is not even about being productive, this is about delight.
