Nicknamed “Big Blue,” International Business Machines (IBM) is one of 30 companies included in the Dow Jones Industrial Average and one of the world’s largest employers, with more than 350,000 IBMers working in over 170 countries. IBM employees have been awarded 5 Nobel Prizes, 6 Turing Awards, 10 National Medals of Technology (USA) and 5 National Medals of Science (USA).
The company’s history dates back to 1911 following the merger of 4 companies in New York by Charles Ranlett Flint and was founded as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company. It was renamed IBM in 1924. The company has maintained its core services of providing hardware and software in addition to continually shifting business operations to stay ahead of technology market trends. Today, IBM has a large and diverse portfolio of products and services — many of which rely on open source — and fall into such categories of cloud computing, Artificial Intelligence (AI), commerce, data and analytics, Internet of Things (IoT), ]IT infrastructure, mobile, digital workplace and security.
IBM is also known as a major research organization, holding the record for most U.S. patents generated by a business for 27 consecutive years. Inventions 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).
In 2019, IBM made international headlines when it acquired Red Hat, an original funding member of OIN.