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ARMONK, N.Y., June 18, 2012 /PRNewswire/ --IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that for the third consecutive year, IDC ranked IBM number one in worldwide market share for enterprise social software. According to IDC's analysis of 2011 revenue, IBM grew faster than its competitors and nearly two times faster than the overall market which grew approximately 40 percent.*

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The growing popularity of social networking continues to explode, with more and more organizations looking for ways to adopt social business practices to integrate global teams, drive innovation, increase productivity and better reach customers and partners.

According to IDC, the enterprise social platforms market is expected to reach $4.5 billion by 2016, representing growth of 43 percent over the next four years.*

While this demand is on the rise, organizations are still looking for ways to embrace social capabilities to transform virtually every part of their business operations, from marketing to research innovation and human resources, but lack the tools to gain insight into the enormous stream of information and use it in a meaningful way.

"Social software is gaining in momentum in the enterprise," says Michael Fauscette, group vice president for IDC's Software Business Solutions Group. "Companies are seeing significant gain in productivity and increasing value from successfully deployed social software solutions including supporting ad hoc work by bringing people, data, content, and systems together in real time and making more effective critical business decisions by providing the 'right information' in the work context."

Today, more than 35 percent of Fortune 100 companies have adopted IBM's social software offerings including eight of the top 10 retailers and banks. IBM's social business software and services is unique combining social networking capabilities with analytics to help companies capture information and insights into dialogues from employees and customers and create interactions that translate into real value.

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IBM's social networking platform, IBM Connections, allows for instant collaboration with one simple click and the ability to build social communities both inside and outside the organization to increase customer loyalty and speed business results. IBM Connections is available both on premise and in the cloud.

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IBM Named Worldwide Marketshare Leader in Social Software for Third Consecutive Year

Despite the clamor around Facebook (Nasdaq: FB), the No. 1 social networking site, the real king of the social networking sector is International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE: IBM), a new survey by IDC found.

Coming in second: Jive Software (Nasdaq: JIVE), of Palo Alto, Calif., with huge year-over-year gains by private Yammer, of San Francisco, which investment bankers speculate is about to be acquired by Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT), the world's biggest software company, for about $1 billion.

The reason is that these social networking companies specialize in the enterprise, or networks of users throughout companies, universities or government agencies whereas Facebook is very consumer-centric.

"We are engaging people in mission-critical applications," said IBM VP for Social Software Jeff Schick. "Our capabilities are focused on business optimization."

Besides involving nearly all of the Armonk, N.Y., computer company's 433,000 employees, IBM's social media software has been deployed by the United Nations, banks like Canada's Toronto-Dominion (NYSE: TD); retailers like Lowe's Companies (NYSE: LOW), the No. 2 U.S. home improvement chain and appliances giant Electrolux AB (Pink: ELUXY).

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Schick said IBM uses many of the same internal applications for customers in a secure environment so that they can collaborate in groups for mutual benefit.

For example, he said after TD Bank acquired several U.S. banks that were open on Sundays, the new U.S. employees used social media to explain to their Canadian counterparts why the practice led to new customers and business and then helped them develop the same service to Canada.

The enterprise social networking market rose about 40 percent between 2010 and 2011 alone, IDC concluded. By 2016, the market value could reach $4.5 billion, for about 43 percent annual growth.

IDC also found the top six social networks currently claim more than 2 billion global users. Twitter dispatches about 340 million daily tweets. Facebook users share about 30 billion content units monthly.

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Facebook? IDC Says IBM Ranks No. 1 In Social Software

PARIS Scientists said Sunday they had found a key piece in the puzzle as to why a tiny minority of individuals infected with HIV have a natural ability to fight off the deadly AIDS virus.

In a study they said holds promise for an HIV vaccine, researchers from four countries noted the secret lies not in the number of infection-killing cells one has, but in how well they work.

Only about one person in 300 has the ability to control the human immunodeficiency virus without drugs, using "killer" cells called cytotoxic T lymphocyte cells, past research found.

Taking that discovery further, scientists from the United States, Canada, Japan and Germany reported that the strain has molecules called receptors that are better able to identify HIV-infected white blood cells for attack.

Until now, it was well known that people with HIV "have tons of these killer cells," said Bruce Walker, an infectious diseases expert at the Ragon Institute in Massachusetts.

"We have been scratching our heads since then, asking how, with so many killer cells around, people are getting AIDS. It turns out there is a special quality that makes them (some cells) better at killing."

The study looked at 10 infected people, of whom five took antiretroviral drugs to keep HIV under control while five were so-called elite controllers who remained naturally healthy.

HIV kills a type of white blood cell called CD4, leaving people with AIDS wide open to other, opportunistic and potentially deadly infections.

"What we found was that the way the killer cells are able to see infected cells and engage them was different," said Walker.

"It is not just that you need a killer cell, what you need is a killer cell with a (T cell) receptor that is particularly good at recognizing the infected cell. This gives us a way to understand what it is that makes a really good killer cell."

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HIV has natural-born killers, researchers find

Today, Microsoft executives are making a major announcement at a press event so secretive they waited until the day of just to reveal the location (Milk Studios in L.A.). Here's the best and rest of the event.

Late last week, Microsoft invited a handful of tech reporters to Los Angeles today for an event that boasts all the shrouded mystique of an Apple keynote. (At press time, reporters hadn't yet received word of the location.) Apple, of course, has mastered the art of hyping press events that stir the vat of consumer desire like little else in the tech world. The similarly frenetic rumor mill is churning out all kinds of speculation on today's pending Microsoft announcement. We'll be following the best of the day's news here, both live from the event and from around the web.

Check back here throughout the day for the latest Microsoft news. For live dispatches from the 3:30 p.m. PST/6:30 p.m. EST event, follow Austin Carr on Twitter.

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The Best Of Today's Mysterious Microsoft Announcement

NEW YORK The White House messed up its history. That's the contention of critics who pointed to references recently appended to the biography pages of past presidents on the White House website.

Scholars of Calvin Coolidge, the president who is our focus, found an error. The Coolidge "Did You Know?" item says that "On Feb. 22, 1924, Calvin Coolidge became the first president to make a public radio address to the American people."

Alas, Coolidge was not the first, as a retired archivist with the National Archives and Records Administration, Jerry L. Wallace, noted in an email to us. The first chief executive to deliver a radio address was Warren G. Harding, whose dedication of the Lincoln Memorial was carried over the airwaves on May 30, 1922.

What the Barack Obama White House did was introduce its own comments and facts to the extant biographies of the presidents on the White House pages. Some commentators such as Seth Mandel at Contentions, the Commentary magazine blog, interpret the effort to draw such parallels as an intrusion on past presidents.

Mandel sees the Obama administration comments as evidence that the president, like many of his young devotees, doesn't "have much memory of the political world before the arrival of The One." You can agree or disagree with this criticism.

The real story here is not the specific Coolidge error or whether you like the new White House comments. It is that accurate history is becoming much harder to deliver than it used to be.

The Internet and databases have raised the bar for all writing on history. Your authors, both students of Coolidge, discovered this firsthand in researching an iconic quote long attributed to Silent Cal.

Coolidge endured severe setbacks in life. Yet he persevered. The Coolidge quotation that captures that perseverance best was printed in a pamphlet in the 1930s by New York Life Insurance Co., where the 30th president served as a director:

"Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan 'press on' has solved and will always solve the problem of the human race."

To say this quotation is loved is an understatement. Historians have routinely slammed anyone who dared suggest it was not uttered by Coolidge.

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Calvin Coolidge persisted in deed, if not in word