IBM
International Business Machines Corporation, or IBM, is a multinational technology corporation headquartered in New York, USA. The company is among the very few IT companies with a history dating back to the nineteenth century. IBM develops and sells computer hardware and software as well as offering infrastructure services and consulting services in areas of all sorts, including mainframe computers and nanotechnology.
IBM has always been known as the world’s largest computer company, with nearly 400,000 employees worldwide, making it the largest IT employer in the world. Despite losing its market leader status to Hewlett-Packard since 2006, the company remains the most profitable. IBM also holds more patents than any American technology company. It’s got engineers and consultants in nearly 200 countries and its IBM Research has 8 labs worldwide. IBM is also ranked second in the list of the world’s largest software companies.
As far as history is concerned, the company was founded in 1896 by Herman Hollerith as the Tabulating Machine Company in New York, USA where it maintains extremely limited operations. It was listed on NYSE in 1916 and adopted its current name in 1924 during which it became a Fortune 500 company.
In the late 1950s, IBM emerged as the dominant vendor in the computer industry with the launch of the IBM 701 and a couple other models in the 700 series of mainframes. The company’s market dominant became more pronounced in the late 1960s and early 1970s with the release of the IBM System 360/370 mainframes. But actions by the US Department of Justice, the rapid rise of minicomputer companies and the birth of the microprocessor all resulted in dilution of IBM’s position in the computer industry, gradually leading the company to diversify into new areas including PC, software as well as services.
In 1981, IBM introduced its Personal Computer, the original version of the IBM PC compatible platform. Descendants of the PC compatibles make up the bulk of microcomputers on today’s market, although IBM sold its large PC division to the emerging Chinese company Lenovo on 1st May 2005 for nearly $700.