IBM Reigns Supreme

Ask Elliott why IBM Global Services has managed to top the VARBusiness 500 for so many years, and he'll tell you about the company's early commitment to building specific skillsets and solutions around e-business technology.

"We understood in the mid-1990s that [e-business] was going to be culture-changing and sustainable and was going to add real business value," Elliott says, noting that IBM quickly made heavy investments to build up technology-deployment skills in areas like Web infrastructure, supply-chain integration and hosting.

Those capabilities played a large role in the company's ability to generate $33 billion in revenue last year. Elliott says that, for the most part, specific IBM services around e-business solutions grew by 50 percent or more.

The first quarter of this year was just as strong, with $10 billion in signings and contract backlogs measuring close to $87 billion. In April, for example, Elliott's group announced it was awarded a 15-year, $1.3 billion contract with the U.S. Customs Service to modernize the department's technology infrastructure.

One way IBM Global Services tries to stay ahead of the industry curve is by routinely making bets on emerging technologies. "We always have three or four growth initiatives in place where we sense a market is growing or taking off," Elliott says. "So we put [together] specialized teams to develop them and quickly respond. One that seems to be hottest is the whole area of mobile and wireless services, particularly focused on enterprises."

With the sheer size and depth of IBM Global Services comes the ability to quickly move resources and investments away from slow-growing areas like consulting and design to hotter areas like outsourcing and deployment. "Having this breadth-of-service portfolio has allowed us to maintain the competitiveness and the growth we've had," Elliott says.

But despite its wealth of resources, IBM Global Services did not make it through the tumultuous year without some reengineering of its own. Like many of its smaller competitors, the company was forced to increase its sales and marketing activities as a result of the IT spending slowdown.

"Everything changed dramatically in 2000 in that we

needed to go out, to find and build demand for some of our services and let people know that we were in some spaces they would not necessarily assume we were in,particularly in the front-end business-process reengineering work," Elliott says.

The organization also made an effort last year to proactively identify specific industries, subindustries and customers that have attributes that make them likely candidates for IBM Global Services' portfolio of solutions.

In other words, even a company as large as IBM Global

Services can't get by in this tight economy without doing some homework to find new customers.

Part 3: Ciber: Always Reinvent Yourself
Part 4: CompuCom Holds the Course

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