Word: palmisano
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...will also deploy hardware and Web-enabled software (from both IBM and others) to make it happen. In some cases IBM will provide the entire system--with the hardware often located far from the customer--as a utility that corporations can buy "just like they buy electricity," as Palmisano has said. Instead of having to make a costly bet on an army of new servers and software, companies like American Express can ramp their computing power up or down as market conditions dictate. "There's a lot less risk for the customer if they can work their...
...have its consultants keep them from breaking down, an approach they predict will soon lose its appeal. IBM's strategy "is an acknowledgment that the very technology it has been peddling all these years has been tremendously complex and expensive," says Barry Goffe, a group manager at Microsoft. Palmisano is quick to fire back at rivals, who have pushed their expensive, "best of breed" tech solutions to hapless customers. "The so-called pure plays were supposed to kill integrated players like IBM every day," he says. "But their model didn't fulfill the economic promises it made...
Meanwhile, Big Blue has more tightly embraced Linux, the grass-roots operating system that Palmisano originally championed inside the company and that is becoming a legitimate threat to both Unix and Microsoft's Windows. IBM's research division, in which the company invests $5 billion a year, is also trying to come up with an "autonomic" technology, so that complex systems can fix themselves, and IBM can serve up technology without spending so much on labor...
...linchpin of Palmisano's strategy is Big Blue's services business, which already accounts for about half the company's revenue. By shrewdly purchasing PWC's consulting business on the cheap at the bottom of the market--only a couple of years after HP had considered buying it for five times the price--Palmisano acquired a wealth of industry-and-process expertise, as well as a valuable Rolodex of high-level CEOs and CFOs who increasingly make big IT purchasing decisions...
...have learned a lot of what he knows from Gerstner, but early in his career Palmisano gleaned valuable insights from another business legend, Sam Walton, founder of Wal-Mart. At the time, Palmisano had been tapped as a "high potential" leader at IBM and was serving a stint as an executive assistant to Gerstner's predecessor, John Akers, learning the ropes by shadowing the CEO. It was 1989, a few years before Gerstner arrived to tear apart IBM's insular culture, and Big Blue was still plagued by rigid hierarchies, endless meetings and wasteful trappings of executive life...