IBM
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File:IBMLogo.png
The IBM Logo
International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) is headquartered in Armonk, New York, USA. The company manufactures and sells computer hardware, software and services.
With its 316,000 employees worldwide and revenues of $81 billion (figures from 2002), it is the largest information technology company in the world, and third oldest (only NCR Corporation and Unisys (traced to American Arithmometer) are older). It has development labs located all over the world and research labs located in various New York City suburbs, San Jose, California, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Zurich, Tokyo, Haifa, Beijing, Austin, and Delhi.
It has a major presence in virtually every segment of the hardware market, from mainframe computers (where it has market dominance) to notebooks. It also produces a wide range of base componentry. However, more and more of its revenue comes from consulting activities rather than simple manufacturing.
Because of the company's historically centralised culture with strict behavioural and dress codes, the company is informally referred to as Big Blue. For example, a blue suit, white shirt and dark tie was once the public uniform of IBM employees. In the 90's, IBM relaxed these codes, and currently the behavior and dress of IBM employees does not differ appreciably from that of their counterparts in most other large technology companies.
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Current business activities
The ready availability of cheap commodity PC clone hardware has greatly diminished the market for IBM's desktop computers. The firm still makes end user hardware, but focus has shifted more towards servers and IT consulting. IBM has launched a massive PR campaign to promote Linux based IT solutions, an effort to prevent Microsoft from encroaching further into the server operating system market.
In 2002, IBM announced the beginning of a $10 billion program to research and implement the infrastructure technology necessary to be able to provide supercomputer-level resources "on demand" to all businesses as a metered utility.
In recent years IBM has aggressively turned to licensing patents as a lucrative source of revenue. Every year from 1993 until 2002, IBM has been granted more U.S. patents than any other company. The ten-year period has resulted in 22,358 patents for which IBM is the primary assignee:
(click on the year to go to IBM's page of accomplishments for that year) Year Patents
Granted2002 3288 2001 3411 2000 2886 1999 2756 1998 2658 1997 1724 1996 1867 1995 1383 1994 1298 1993 1087
The aggressive protection of the company's intellectual property has grown into a business of its own, generating billions of dollars of profit for the company during this period.
History
IBM's history dates back decades before the development of computers -- before that it developed punched card data processing equipment. It originated as the Computing Tabulating Recording (CTR) Corporation, which was incorporated on June 15, 1911 in Binghamton, New York. This company was a merger of the Tabulating Machine Corporation, the Computing Scale Corporation and the International Time Recording Company. The president of the Tabulating Machine Corporation at that time was Herman Hollerith. Thomas J. Watson Sr., the founder of IBM, became General Manager of CTR in 1914 and President in 1915. On February 14, 1924, CTR changed its name to International Business Machines Corporation.
The companies that merged to form CTR manufactured a wide range of products, including employee time keeping systems, weighing scales, automatic meat slicers, and most importantly for the development of the computer, punched card equipment. Over time CTR came to focus purely on the punched card business, and ceased its involvement in these other activities.
Business culture
IBM has often been described as having a salesman centric or a sales oriented business culture. Traditionally, many of its managers would be chosen from its sales force. In addition, middle and top management would often be enlisted to give direct support to salesmen in the process of making sales to important customers.
Trivia
Whilst IBM did not invent the personal computer, architectures cloned from its original 1981 design (which relied on third-party componentry) became the industry standard. Microsoft and Intel became monopoly suppliers of two of the key components of compatible systems.
On January 19, 1993 IBM announced a $4.97 billion loss for 1992 which was at that time the largest single-year corporate loss in United States history.
The IBM Logo was designed by Paul Rand.
Louis V. Gerstner, Jr. was the Chairman and CEO of IBM from April 1, 1993, until January 29, 2002, when Samuel J. Palmisano was elected CEO after having been instrumental in helping to grow IBM's Global Services unit into a business with tens of billions of dollars in backlog.
Recent IBM acquisitions include the following:
- Lotus Development Corporation in 1995 for $3.5 billion.
- Tivoli Systems in 1995 for $750 million.
- Sequent Computer Systems in 1999 for $810 million.
- Informix Software (a purchase of assets rather than a true acquisition) in 2001 for $1.0 billion.
- Rational Software Corporation in 2002 for $2.1 billion.
- PricewaterhouseCoopers' Consulting in 2002 for $3.5 billion (recalculated by IBM in August 2003 as $3.9 billion).
See Also: List of IBM products
External links
References
- Adapted from the Wikipedia article, "IBM" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM December 27, 2003
