IBM announced its Social Business strategy at its Lotusphere 2011 conference in Orlando, Fla., Jan. 31. IBM introduced software, services and programs that will help organizations integrate social-networking concepts into business processes to accelerate collaboration, deepen customer relationships, generate ideas faster and enable a more effective workforce. Whether accessing applications on premise, from a mobile device or in the cloud, businesses of all sizes need to communicate and collaborate on the fly across a global network of clients, partners and employees. To fully enable a social business, IBM announced new software to help organizations socially enable their business processes using the most successful mobile devices&#151including tablets&#151such as RIM’s BlackBerry and PlayBook, Apples iPad and iPhone, the multitude of Google Android-based devices and Nokia handsets. IBM also rolled out software and services to help businesses embrace the social business models through cloud computing, including a technology preview of IBM’s cloud-based office-productivity suite. And IBM shared plans for the next release of its social software portfolio to enable social business, including a social business framework for software developers. The question that remains, however, is whether IBM can become the Facebook of the business world, or at least the provider of tools for it. – …