Backbone and Brains – Building Elegant Business Solutions

The Challenge

2020 was a turbulent time for many businesses, challenging their organization’s security, flexibility and reliability.

With the cancellation of live events due to COVID-19, the IBM IT Infrastructure team needed a way to stay top of mind and spark conversations between clients and IBM experts in a digital environment.

It was critical that we appealed to an audience with varying IT knowledge and decision makers at all levels. To strike the right balance, we developed content that was high-level enough for C-level executives, wrapped up in an experience that even a knowledgeable IT manager could enjoy and find relevant.

Our Solution

Backbone & Brains is an interactive, audio-visual digital experience showcasing the beauty of a business operating at its peak, with the help of IBM IT Infrastructure solutions. Users have the opportunity to explore a 3-dimensional environment featuring a dynamic ‘gem’ structure at the heart of it–representing an amalgamation of IBM products. Through a series of hotspot explorations, users discover how IBM can help them achieve digital transformation by bringing together smart infrastructure (backbone) and industry-leading expertise (brains) in support of their business–ultimately driving to case studies which highlight the value of the solutions.

This digital activation will be leveraged across a variety of IBM events globally, so the experience had to prioritize flexibility. To enable reusability and editability, the main experience was built to be easily translated and the editorial section is supported by a content management system that allows global teams to customize the case studies to feature the most relevant stories.

Launched at IBM Think 2021 along with several other digital activations, the story and design/look and feel helped the activation stand out while remaining aligned to the larger IBM narrative around hybrid cloud.