The International Business Machines Corporation (IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American transnational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It specializes in computer hardware, middleware, and software and provides hosting and consulting services in areas ranging from mainframe computers to nanotechnology. IBM is the largest artificial exploration association in the world, with 19 exploration installations across a dozen countries, and has held the record for the most periodic U.S. patents generated by a business for 29 successive times, from 1993 to 2021.
IBM was founded in 1911 as the Computing, Tabulating, and Recording Company (CTR), a holding company of manufacturers of record-keeping and measuring systems. It was renamed” International Business Machines” in 1924 and soon became the leading manufacturer of punch-card tabulating systems. For the coming several decades, IBM would become an astute leader in several arising technologies, including electric typewriters, electromechanical calculators, and particular computers. During the 1960s and 1970s, the IBM mainframe, instanced by the System/360, was the dominant computing platform, and the company produced 80 percent of computers in the U.S. and 70 percent of computers worldwide.
Following the introduction of the multipurpose microcomputer in the 1980s, which set the standard for specific computers, IBM began to lose request dominance to emerging challengers. Beginning in the 1990s, the company began reducing its operations and divesting from commodity products, most notably selling its particular computer division to the Lenovo Group in 2005. IBM has since concentrated on computer services, software, supercomputers, and scientific exploration. Since 2000, its supercomputers have constantly ranked among the most important in the world, and in 2001 it became the first company to obtain more than 3,000 patents at one time, beating this record in 2008 with over 4,000 patents. As of 2022, the company held 150,000 patents.
As one of the world’s oldest and largest technology companies, IBM has been responsible for several technological inventions, including the automated teller machine (ATM), dynamic arbitrary-access memory (DRAM), the droopy fragment, the hard fragment drive, the glamorous stripe card, the relational database, the SQL programming language, and the UPC barcode. The company has made advances in advanced computer chips, amount computing, artificial intelligence, and data structure. IBM workers or alumni have won colorful recognitions for their scientific exploration and inventions, including six Nobel Prizes and six Turing Awards.
IBM is a publicly traded company and one of 30 companies in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. It’s among the world’s largest employers, with over 900,000 workers worldwide in 2022. Despite its relative decline within the technology sector, IBM is the seventh largest technology company by profit and the 49th largest overall, according to Fortune. It’s also constantly ranked among the world’s most recognizable, precious, and respected brands, with a devoted following among numerous tech enthusiasts and consumers.
History:
IBM was invented in 1911 in Endicott, New York, as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR) and was renamed” International Business Machines” in 1924. IBM is incorporated in New York and has operations in over 170 countries.
In the 1880s, technologies surfaced that would eventually form the core of International Business Machines (IBM). Julius E. Pitrap patented the computing scale in 1885; Alexander Dey constructed the dial archivist (1888); Herman Hollerith (1860–1929) patented the electric tabulating machine; and Willard Bundy constructed a timepiece to record a worker’s appearance and departure time on a paper tape recording in 1889. On June 16, 1911, their four companies were consolidated in New York State by Charles Ranlett Flint, forming a fifth company, the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR), grounded in Endicott, New York. The five companies had 300 workers, services, and shops in Endicott and Binghamton, New York; Dayton, Ohio; Detroit, Michigan; Washington, D.C.; and Toronto.
They manufactured goods for trade and parcel, ranging from marketable scales and artificial time reporters, to meat and rubbish slicers, tabulators, and punched cards. Thomas J. Watson, Sr., fired from the National Cash Register Company by John Henry Patterson, called on Flint and, in 1914, was offered a position at CTR. Watson joined CTR as general director and, 11 months later, was made president when court cases relating to his time at NCR were resolved. Having learned Patterson’s pioneering business practices, Watson progressed to put the stamp of NCR on CTR’s companies. He enforced deals conventions,” including “generous deals impulses, a focus on client service, an asseveration on well-prepared, dark-suited clerks and “an evangelical vehemence for breeding company pride and fidelity in every worker”. His favorite watchword, “suppose,” became a mantra for each company’s workers. During Watson’s first four quarters, earnings reached $9 million ($141 million at the moment), and the company’s operations expanded to Europe, South America, Asia, and Australia.
On March 7, 2022, many days after the launch of the Russian irruption in Ukraine, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna published a Ukrainian flag and blazoned that” we have suspended all business in Russia”. All Russian papers were also removed from the IBM website. On June 7, Krishna blared that IBM would carry out an” orderly wind-down” of its operations in Russia.
Finance:
For the financial year 2020, IBM reported earnings of $5.6 billion with a periodic profit of $73.6 billion. IBM’s profit has fallen in eight of the last nine quarters. IBM’s request for capitalization was valued at over $ 127 billion as of April 2021. IBM ranked No. 38 on the 2020 Fortune 500 rankings of the largest United States companies by total profit. In 2014, IBM was indicted for using” fiscal engineering” to hit its daily earnings targets rather than investing for the long term.
Brand and reputation:
IBM is nicknamed Big Blue,” partially due to its blue totem and color scheme and also in reference to its former de facto dress code of white shirts with blue suits. The company totem has experienced several changes over time, with its current” 8-bar” totem designed in 1972 by graphic developer Paul Rand. It was a general relief for a 13-bar totem since period photocopiers didn’t render narrow (as opposed to altitudinous) stripes well. Away from the totem, IBM used Helvetica as a commercial typeface 50 times until it was replaced in 2017 by the custom-designed IBM Plex.
IBM has a precious brand as a result of over 100 years of operations and marketing juggernauts. Since 1996, IBM has been the exclusive technology partner for the Master’s event, one of the four major crowns in professional golf, with IBM creating the firstMasters.org (1996). As a result, IBM CEO Ginni Rometty became the third woman to join the Masters’ governing body, the Augusta National Golf Club. IBM is also a major sponsor in professional tennis, with engagements in the U.S. The company also patronized the Olympic Games from 1960 to 2000 and the National Football League from 2003 to 2012.
In 2012, IBM’s brand was valued at $75.5 billion and ranked by Interbrand as the third-stylish brand worldwide. That same time, it was also ranked the top company for leaders (Fortune), the number two green company in the U.S. (Newsweek), the second-most admired company (Barron’s), the fifth-most admired company (Fortune), the 18th-most innovative company (Fast Company), and the number one in technology consulting and number two in outsourcing (Vault). In 2015, Forbes ranked IBM as the fifth-most valuable brand, and for 2020, the Drucker Institute named IBM the No. 3 best-managed company. During the 2022 Russian irruption of Ukraine, IBM bestowed $2,000 to Polish philanthropic Action and the same amount to People in Need in the Czech Republic.
In ESG, IBM reported total CO2 emigrations (direct and indirect) for the twelve months ending December 31, 2020, at 621 Kt (- 324/-34.3 y/y). In February 2021, IBM committed to achieving net zero greenhouse gas emigrations by the year 2030.
Brand Logos
Board and shareholders:
The company’s 15-member board of directors is responsible for overall commercial operations and includes the current or former CEOs of Anthem, Dow Chemical, Johnson & Johnson, Royal Dutch Shell, UPS, and Vanguard, as well as the chairpersons of Cornell University and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a sheltered U.S. Navy crewmate.
In 2011, IBM was the first technology company that Warren Buffett’s holding company Berkshire Hathaway invested in. Originally, he bought 64 million shares at $10.5 billion. Over the years, Buffet increased his IBM holdings, but by the end of 2017, he had reduced them by 94.5 percent to 2.05 million shares; by May 2018, he was fully out of IBM.
