Portal:IBM
Portal maintenance status: (October 2018)
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Introduction
International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) is an American multinational information technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States, with operations in over 170 countries. The company began in 1911 as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR) and was renamed "International Business Machines" in 1924.
IBM manufactures and markets computer hardware, middleware and software, and provides hosting and consulting services in areas ranging from mainframe computers to nanotechnology. IBM is also a major research organization, holding the record for most U.S. patents generated by a business (as of 2018) for 25 consecutive years. Inventions by IBM include the automated teller machine (ATM), the floppy disk, the hard disk drive, the magnetic stripe card, the relational database, the SQL programming language, the UPC barcode, and dynamic random-access memory (DRAM). The IBM mainframe, exemplified by the System/360, was the dominant computing platform during the 1960s and 1970s.
Selected general articles
- The IBM Q Experience is an online platform that gives users in the general public access to a set of IBM's prototype quantum processors via the Cloud, an online internet forum for discussing quantum computing relevant topics, a set of tutorials on how to program the IBM Q devices, and other educational material about quantum computing. It is an example of cloud based quantum computing. As of May 2018, there are three processors on the IBM Q Experience: two 5-qubit processors and a 16-qubit processor. This service can be used to run algorithms and experiments, and explore tutorials and simulations around what might be possible with quantum computing. The site also provides an easily discoverable list of research papers published using the IBM Q Experience as an experimentation platform.
IBM's quantum processors are made up of superconducting transmon qubits, located in a dilution refrigerator at the IBM Research headquarters at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center. Read more... - Information Management Software is one of the brands within IBM Software Group (SWG) division. The major Information Management products include:
- DB2 — relational database management system (RDBMS)
- Informix Dynamic Server — high-throughput database server for online transaction processing (OLTP)
- Cloudscape — embedded RDBMS for Java
- Information Management System (IMS) — hierarchical database and information management system
- OmniFind — search and text analytics software
- Enterprise Content Management — IBM services for managing content, optimizing business processes and enabling compliance
- pureQuery - data access platform
- IBM RFID Information Center (RFIDIC) - Tracking and tracing products through global supply chains
- IBM InfoSphere DataStage - an ETL tool
- InfoSphere Guardium – Real-time database security and monitoring solutions to safeguard enterprise data (SAP, PeopleSoft, etc.) and address regulatory compliance requirements
David Nelson Farr (born 1955) is an American business executive. He is the chairman and CEO of Emerson Electric Company, a Fortune 500 company. Farr has worked at the company since 1981. He is married with two children and is a resident of Ladue, Missouri.
On October 25, 2011, IBM announced Farr was elected to its board of directors, and he joined the board on January 1, 2012. Read more...
330 North Wabash (formerly IBM Plaza also known as IBM Building and now renamed AMA Plaza) is a skyscraper in downtown Chicago, Illinois, United States, at 330 N. Wabash Avenue, designed by famed architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (who died in 1969 before construction began). A small bust of the architect by sculptor Marino Marini is displayed in the lobby. The 52-story building is situated on a plaza overlooking the Chicago River. At 695 feet (211.8 meters), 330 North Wabash is the second-tallest building by Mies van der Rohe, the tallest being the Toronto-Dominion Bank Tower at Toronto-Dominion Centre. It was his last American building.
The building's original corporate namesake no longer owns nor has offices in the building. IBM sold IBM Plaza to the Blackstone Group in 1996. IBM all but completed its move out of IBM Plaza as of early 2006, taking up space in the new Hyatt Center building closer to Union Station. Current major tenants are the American Medical Association, Langham Chicago managed by Langham Hotels International, WeWork and law firm Latham & Watkins. Read more...- The globally integrated enterprise is a term coined in 2006 by Sam Palmisano, the then CEO of IBM Corp, used to denote "a company that fashions its strategy, its management, and its operations in pursuit of a new goal: the integration of production and value delivery worldwide." Read more...
- ILOG was an international software company purchased and incorporated into IBM announced in January, 2009. It created enterprise software products for supply chain, business rule management, visualization and optimization. The main product line for Business Rules Management Systems (BRMS) has been rebranded as IBM Operational Decision Manager (ODM). Many of the related components retain the ILOG brand as a part of their name.
The software developed by the ILOG software company supports several software platforms, including COBOL, C++, C#, .NET, Java, AJAX and Adobe Flex / AIR. Read more...
Samuel J. Palmisano (born July 29, 1951) was president and the eighth chief executive officer of IBM until January 2012. He also served as Chairman of the company until October 1, 2012.
Palmisano was appointed president and chief operating officer (COO) effective in October 2000. He was promoted to CEO in March 2002, while retaining the title of president, and named chairman effective January 1, 2003. Palmisano announced on October 25, 2011 that he was stepping aside as president and CEO. He was succeeded in these positions by Ginni Rometty. Read more...- Online Business or e-business is any kind of business or commercial transaction that includes sharing information across the internet. Commerce constitutes the exchange of products and services between businesses, groups and individuals and can be seen as one of the essential activities of any business. Electronic commerce focuses on the use of ICT to enable the external activities and relationships of the business with individuals, groups and other businesses, while e-business refers to business with help of the internet. The term "e-business" was coined by IBM's marketing and Internet team in 1996. Read more...
IBM Hursley is a research and development laboratory belonging to International Business Machines in the village of Hursley, Hampshire, England. Established in Hursley House, an 18th-century Queen Anne style mansion in 1958, the facility has been instrumental in the development of IBM’s software technologies since the 1950s. It is still the home of development for CICS and MQ technology.
Initially, IBM just used the House and its grounds. In 1963 it purchased 100 acres (405,000 m2) of land surrounding the house and has since erected a large modern office complex employing over 1500 people. Read more...
Large Möbius strip with traveling arrow
Mathematica: A World of Numbers… and Beyond is a kinetic and static exhibition of mathematical concepts designed by Charles and Ray Eames, originally debuted at the California Museum of Science and Industry in 1961. Duplicates have since been made, and they (as well as the original) have been moved to other institutions. Read more...- Lotus Software (called Lotus Development Corporation before its acquisition by IBM) was an American software company based in Massachusetts; it was "offloaded" to India's HCL corporation in 2017.
Lotus is most commonly known for the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet application, the first feature-heavy, user-friendly, reliable and WYSIWYG-enabled product to become widely available in the early days of the IBM PC, when there was no graphical user interface. Much later, in conjunction with Ray Ozzie's Iris Associates, Lotus also released a groupware and email system, Lotus Notes. IBM purchased the company in 1995 for US$3.5 billion, primarily to acquire Lotus Notes and to establish a presence in the increasingly important client–server computing segment, which was rapidly making host-based products such as IBM's OfficeVision obsolete. Read more... - Deep Thought was a computer designed to play chess. Deep Thought was initially developed at Carnegie Mellon University and later at IBM. It was second in the line of chess computers developed by Feng-hsiung Hsu, starting with ChipTest and culminating in Deep Blue. In addition to Hsu, the Deep Thought team included Thomas Anantharaman, Mike Browne, Murray Campbell and Andreas Nowatzyk. Deep Thought became the first computer to beat a grandmaster in a regular tournament game when it beat Bent Larsen in 1988, but was easily defeated in both games of a two-game match with Garry Kasparov in 1989 as well as in a correspondence match with Michael Valvo.
It was named after Deep Thought, a fictional computer in Douglas Adams' series, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The naming of chess computers has continued in this vein with Deep Blue, Deep Fritz, Deep Junior, etc. Read more...
Shirley Ann Jackson, FREng (born August 5, 1946) is an American physicist, and the eighteenth president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She is the first African-American woman to have earned a doctorate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She is also the second African-American woman in the United States to earn a doctorate in physics, and the first to be awarded the National Medal of Science. Read more...
A floppy disk, also called a floppy, diskette, or just disk, is a type of disk storage composed of a disk of thin and flexible magnetic storage medium, sealed in a rectangular plastic enclosure lined with fabric that removes dust particles. Floppy disks are read and written by a floppy disk drive (FDD).
Floppy disks, initially as 8-inch (200 mm) media and later in 5 1⁄4-inch (133 mm) and 3 1⁄2-inch (90 mm) sizes, were a ubiquitous form of data storage and exchange from the mid-1970s into the first years of the 21st century. By 2006 computers were rarely manufactured with installed floppy disk drives; 3 1⁄2-inch floppy disks can be used with an external USB floppy disk drive, but USB drives for 5 1⁄4-inch, 8-inch, and non-standard diskettes are rare to non-existent. These formats are usually handled by older equipment. Read more...- IBM Yamato Facility located in the city of Yamato, Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan, is where IBM's research and development activities are done for IBM's worldwide and Asia-Pacific region market. Its buildings were designed by the architecture firm of Nikken Sekkei Ltd. and completed in 1985. In July, 2012, all IBM research and development functions completed moving to IBM Toyosu Facility, Tokyo. The last IBM-related organizations left Yamoto around September, 2012, and the facility is no longer associated with IBM. Read more...
- The following is a partial list of IBM precursors, acquisitions and spinoffs. IBM has undergone a large number of mergers and acquisitions during a corporate history lasting over a century; the company has also produced a number of spinoffs during that time.
The acquisition date listed is the date of the agreement between IBM and the subject of the acquisition. The value of each acquisition is listed in USD because IBM is based in the United States. If the value of an acquisition is not listed, then it is undisclosed. Read more... - The IBM Center for The Business of Government produces and disseminates thought leadership that focuses on public management issues facing government executives at all levels. According to its mission statement, the center seeks to connect public management research to practice in order to improve government effectiveness and performance. It does this by funding independent third-party research, publishing a bi-annual magazine, producing a weekly radio interview program, convening discussions with practitioners and academics, and hosting forums and various blogs and other online content. Read more...
- IBM Redbooks are technical content developed and published by IBM's International Technical Support Organization (ITSO).
IBM Redbooks are ITSO's core product. They typically provide positioning and value guidance, installation and implementation experiences, typical solution scenarios, and step-by-step "how-to" guides. They often include sample code and other support materials that are also available as downloads. Among the media options available are hard copy books, in IBM Redbooks CD-ROM collections, and on the Internet. IBM says that Redbooks publications are downloaded and viewed approximately 1.75M per quarter, on average Read more...
A scanning tunneling microscope (STM) is an instrument for imaging surfaces at the atomic level. Its development in 1981 earned its inventors, Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer (at IBM Zürich), the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1986. For an STM, good resolution is considered to be 0.1 nm lateral resolution and 0.01 nm (10 pm) depth resolution. With this resolution, individual atoms within materials are routinely imaged and manipulated. The STM can be used not only in ultra-high vacuum but also in air, water, and various other liquid or gas ambients, and at temperatures ranging from near zero kelvin to over 1000 °C.
STM is based on the concept of quantum tunneling. When a conducting tip is brought very near to the surface to be examined, a bias (voltage difference) applied between the two can allow electrons to tunnel through the vacuum between them. The resulting tunneling current is a function of tip position, applied voltage, and the local density of states (LDOS) of the sample. Information is acquired by monitoring the current as the tip's position scans across the surface, and is usually displayed in image form. STM can be a challenging technique, as it requires extremely clean and stable surfaces, sharp tips, excellent vibration control, and sophisticated electronics, but nonetheless many hobbyists have built their own. Read more...- IBM Research – Ireland opened in 2011 at the IBM Technology Campus located in Damastown Industrial Park, northwest of Dublin, Ireland, as the first and only IBM Research lab in the European Union. It is one of IBM Research's 12 worldwide research laboratories and was supported by an IDA Ireland investment of up to EUR 66 million. Research staff members are both multicultural and multidisciplinary. Scientists from Europe, Asia, Africa and North and South America are working together possessing a broad range of competencies in data-centric systems and edge computing, optimization, and control, decision science, statistics, machine learning, large-scale modeling, data mining and assimilation, deep semantic reasoning and natural language processing.
The lab's original mission, as IBM's Smarter Cities Technology Centre, was to address real world challenges across transportation, water management, sustainable energy, urban information management, risk management and hybrid systems and exascale computing domains. Read more...
A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk, is an electromechanical data storage device that uses magnetic storage to store and retrieve digital information using one or more rigid rapidly rotating disks (platters) coated with magnetic material. The platters are paired with magnetic heads, usually arranged on a moving actuator arm, which read and write data to the platter surfaces. Data is accessed in a random-access manner, meaning that individual blocks of data can be stored or retrieved in any order and not only sequentially. HDDs are a type of non-volatile storage, retaining stored data even when powered off.
Introduced by IBM in 1956, HDDs became the dominant secondary storage device for general-purpose computers by the early 1960s. Continuously improved, HDDs have maintained this position into the modern era of servers and personal computers. More than 200 companies have produced HDDs historically, though after extensive industry consolidation most units are manufactured by Seagate, Toshiba, and Western Digital. HDDs dominate the volume of storage produced (exabytes per year) for servers. Though production is growing slowly, sales revenues and unit shipments are declining because solid-state drives (SSDs) have higher data-transfer rates, higher areal storage density, better reliability, and much lower latency and access times. Read more...- The Virtual Universe Community or VUC is the internal IBM interest group for Virtual Worlds.
Every IBMer that is present within any Virtual World or Virtual Universe must comply with the IBM Virtual World Guidelines. Read more...
Samuel J. Palmisano (born July 29, 1951) was president and the eighth chief executive officer of IBM until January 2012. He also served as Chairman of the company until October 1, 2012.
Palmisano was appointed president and chief operating officer (COO) effective in October 2000. He was promoted to CEO in March 2002, while retaining the title of president, and named chairman effective January 1, 2003. Palmisano announced on October 25, 2011 that he was stepping aside as president and CEO. He was succeeded in these positions by Ginni Rometty. Read more...- The IBM Academy of Technology was founded in 1989 and modeled after the US National Academies of Sciences and Engineering. It focuses on the technical underpinnings of IBM’s future. Its membership consists of over 800 of IBM's technical leaders from around the world who are working in research, hardware and software development, manufacturing, applications, and services.
Members are selected to the Academy by their peers. Membership carries with it responsibilities. Primarily, to engage in Academy-sponsored activities and to promote technical growth IBM-wide. Read more... - Sidney Taurel (born February 9, 1949, in Casablanca) is a Spanish, Morocco-born American businessman. He is the chairman of Pearson plc and chairman emeritus of Eli Lilly and Company, where he had a 37-year career and served as chairman and chief executive officer from 1998 to 2008. He became chairman of Pearson in January 2016. He is currently a director of IBM corporation and advises Almirall S.A. on issues of corporate strategy. Read more...
- IBM has had business internationally since before the company had a name. Early leaders of the companies that would eventually become IBM (Mr Hollerith, Mr Flint, and Mr Watson) all were involved in doing international business.
In those early days, IBM had 70 foreign branches and subsidiaries worldwide. Competitors in the pre-World War II era included Remington Rand, Powers, Bull, NCR, Burroughs, and others. Read more... - Watson is a question-answering computer system capable of answering questions posed in natural language, developed in IBM's DeepQA project by a research team led by principal investigator David Ferrucci. Watson was named after IBM's first CEO, industrialist Thomas J. Watson.
The computer system was initially developed to answer questions on the quiz show Jeopardy! and, in 2011, the Watson computer system competed on Jeopardy! against legendary champions Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings winning the first place prize of $1 million. Read more... - The history of operating systems running on IBM mainframes is a notable chapter of history of mainframe operating systems, because of IBM's long-standing position as the world's largest hardware supplier of mainframe computers.
Arguably the operating systems which IBM supplied to customers for use on its early mainframes have seldom been very innovative, except for the virtual machine systems beginning with CP-67. But the company's well-known reputation for preferring proven technology has generally given potential users the confidence to adopt new IBM systems fairly quickly. IBM's current mainframe operating systems, z/OS, z/VM, z/VSE, and z/TPF, are backward compatible successors to operating systems introduced in the 1960s, although of course they have been improved in many ways. Read more... - The IBM Mashup Center is an end-to-end enterprise mashup platform that enables the rapid creation, sharing, and discovery of reusable application building blocks (widgets, feeds, mashups) that can be easily assembled into new applications or leveraged within existing applications. Read more...
- Dynamic Infrastructure is an information technology paradigm concerning the design of data centers so that the underlying hardware and software can respond dynamically to changing levels of demand in more fundamental and efficient ways than before. The paradigm is also known as Infrastructure 2.0 and Next Generation Data Center.
Some vendors promoting dynamic infrastructures include IBM, Microsoft, Sun, Fujitsu, HP, Dell, and Bright Computing. Read more... - The IBM Research – Tokyo, which was called IBM Tokyo Research Laboratory (TRL) before January 2009, is one of IBM's twelve major worldwide research laboratories. It is a branch of IBM Research. About 200 researchers work for TRL.
Established in 1982 as the Japan Science Institute (JSI) in Tokyo, it was renamed to IBM Tokyo Research Laboratory in 1986, and moved to Yamato in 1992 and back to Tokyo in 2012. Read more...
Thomas John Watson Sr. (February 17, 1874 – June 19, 1956) was an American businessman. He served as the chairman and CEO of International Business Machines (IBM). He oversaw the company's growth into an international force from 1914 to 1956. Watson developed IBM's management style and corporate culture from John Henry Patterson's training at NCR. He turned the company into a highly-effective selling organization, based largely on punched card tabulating machines. A leading self-made industrialist, he was one of the richest men of his time and was called the world's greatest salesman when he died in 1956. Read more...- A keypunch is a device for precisely punching holes into stiff paper cards at specific locations as determined by keys struck by a human operator. Other devices included here for that same function include the gang punch, the pantograph punch, and the stamp.
For Jacquard looms, the resulting punched cards were joined together to form a paper tape, called a "chain", containing a program that, when read by a loom, directed its operation. Read more...
James W. Owens with Barack Obama
James W. Owens is an American economist and manufacturing executive. He is the former chairman and chief executive officer of Caterpillar Inc., the world's largest manufacturer of construction and mining equipment, diesel and natural gas engines and industrial gas turbines. He held the positions from 1 February 2004 through 2010. Read more...- SPSS Statistics is a software package used for interactive, or batched, statistical analysis. Long produced by SPSS Inc., it was acquired by IBM in 2009. The current versions (2015) are named IBM SPSS Statistics.
The software name originally stood for Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS), reflecting the original market, although the software is now popular in other fields as well, including the health sciences and marketing. Read more...
IBM Rochester is the facility of IBM in Rochester, Minnesota, not to be confused with the IBM Global Services facility in Rochester, New York. The initial structure was designed by Eero Saarinen, who clad the structure in blue panels of varying hues after being inspired by the Minnesota sky, as well as IBM's nickname of "Big Blue". These features and the facility's size has earned it the nickname "The Big Blue Zoo" from employees. Read more...- The IBM Pulse conference is a large annual IBM Service Management event that is intended to bring together a community of IBM Customers, Business Partners, industry analysts, and technical experts to discuss the latest technology and best practices in the Service Management industry. The conference mainly focuses on IBM Tivoli, Maximo and Tivoli Netcool products and solutions. Read more...
- John Fellows Akers (December 28, 1934 – August 22, 2014) was a U.S. businessman. At International Business Machines Corporation (IBM), he was president between 1983 and 1989, the CEO from 1985 until 1993, and chairman between 1986 and 1993.
Akers attended Yale, and while there became a brother of Delta Kappa Epsilon (Phi chapter). Read more...
The main laboratory building of the IBM Research Center is located in Yorktown Heights, New York, U.S.
The Thomas J. Watson Research Center is the headquarters for IBM Research. The center comprises two sites, with its main laboratory in Yorktown Heights, New York, U.S., 38 miles (61 km) north of New York City and with offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Read more...- International Business Machines, or IBM, nicknamed "Big Blue", is a multinational computer technology and IT consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM originated from the bringing together of several companies that worked to automate routine business transactions. In 1911 the company that leased Unit record equipment, especially Hollerith punched cards and card readers to government bureaus and insurance agencies, became the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR). Thomas J. Watson (1874-1956) took over in 1924, using the name "International Business Machines." IBM expanded into electric typewriters and other office machines. Watson was a salesman and concentrated on building a highly motivated, very well paid sales force that could craft solutions for clients unfamiliar with the latest technology. His motto was "THINK"; customers were advised to not "fold, spindle or mutilate" the delicate cardboard cards. IBM's first experiments with computers in the 1940s and 1950s were modest advances on the card-based system. Its great breakthrough came in the 1960s with its Model 360 mainframe. IBM offered a full range of hardware, software and service agreements, so that users as their needs grew would stay with "Big Blue." Since most software was custom-written by in-house programmers, and would run on only one brand of computers, it was too expensive to switch brands. Brushing off clone makers, and facing down a federal anti-trust suit, the giant sold reputation and security as well as hardware, and was the most admired American corporation of the 1970s and 1980s.
The late 1980s and early 1990s were cruel to IBM—losses in 1993 exceeded $8 billion—as the mainframe giant failed to adjust quickly enough to the personal computer revolution. Desktop machines had the power needed, and were vastly easier for both users and managers than multimillion-dollar mainframes. IBM did introduce a popular line of microcomputers—but it was too popular. Clone makers undersold IBM, while the profits went to chip makers like Intel or software houses like Microsoft. After a series of reorganizations IBM has become one of the world's largest computer companies and systems integrators. With over 400,000 employees worldwide as of 2014, IBM holds more patents than any other U.S. based technology company and has twelve research laboratories worldwide. The company has scientists, engineers, consultants, and sales professionals in over 175 countries. IBM employees have earned five Nobel Prizes, four Turing Awards, five National Medals of Technology, and five National Medals of Science. Read more... - Truven Health Analytics is a IBM Watson Health Company that provides healthcare data and analytics services. It provides information, analytic tools, benchmarks, research, and services to the healthcare industry, including hospitals, government agencies, employers, health plans, clinicians, pharmaceutical, biotech and medical device companies.
Formerly the Thomson Healthcare of Thomson Corporation, on April 23, 2012, Thomson Reuters agreed to sell this business to Veritas Capital for US$1.25 billion. On June 6, 2012, the sale of the healthcare division was finalized and the new company, Truven Health Analytics, became an independent organization solely focused on healthcare. Truven is a portmanteau of the words "trusted" and "proven". IBM Corporation acquired Truven on February 18, 2016, and merged with IBM's Watson Health unit. Read more...
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Selected images
The Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, is one of 12 IBM research labs worldwide.
Employees demonstrating IBM Watson capabilities in a Jeopardy! exhibition match on campus, 2011
Blue Gene was awarded the National Medal of Technology and Innovation in 2009.
InterConnect, IBM's annual conference on cloud computing and mobile technologies
IBM ads at John F. Kennedy International Airport, 2013
An IBM System/360 in use at the University of Michigan c. 1969.
IBM Fellow Benoit Mandelbrot discovered fractal geometry in 1975.
IBM inventions: (clockwise from top-left) the hard-disk drive, DRAM, the UPC bar code, and the magnetic stripe card
NACA researchers using an IBM type 704 electronic data processing machine in 1957
IBM CHQ in Armonk, New York in 2014
Pangu Plaza, one of IBM's offices in Beijing, China
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