In IBM's view, today's networked economy has created a global business landscape and a mandate for business change. Integrated global economies have opened markets of new opportunity and new sources of skills. The Internet has enabled communication and collaboration across the world and brought with it a new computing model premised on continuous global connection. In that landscape, companies can distribute work and technology anywhere in the world.
Given these opportunities, IBM is working with its clients to develop new business designs and technical architectures that allow their businesses the flexibility required to compete in this new landscape. The business is also adjusting its footprint toward emerging geographies, tapping their double-digit growth, providing the technology infrastructure they need, and taking advantage of the talent pools they provide to better service the company’s clients.
IBM's clients include many different kinds of enterprises, from sole proprietorships to the world's largest organizations, governments and companies representing every major industry and endeavor.
The majority of the company's enterprise business, which excludes the company's original equipment manufacturer (OEM) technology business, occurs in industries that are broadly grouped into six sectors:
-Financial Services: Banking, Financial Markets, Insurance
-Public: Education, Government, Healthcare, Life Sciences
-Industrial: Aerospace, Automotive, Defense, Chemical and Petroleum, Electronics
-Distribution: Consumer Products, Retail, Travel, Transportation
-Communications: Telecommunications, Media and Entertainment, Energy and Utilities
-Small and Medium Business: Mainly companies with less than 1,000 employees
CORPORATE CITIZENSHIP
The primary focus of our corporate citizenship activities is on developing initiatives to address specific societal issues, such as the environment, community economic development, education, health, literacy, language and culture. We employ IBM's most valuable resources, our technology and talent, in order to create innovative programs in these areas to assist communities around the world.
For example, our Corporate Service Corps program annually deploys teams of selected high potential employees to emerging regions to work with government, nonprofit and non-governmental organizations on critical local projects. Teams have completed projects in Ghana, Romania, Tanzania, the Philippines and Vietnam around water quality, disaster preparedness and project management.
Our World Community Grid initiative utilizes grid computing technology to harness the tremendous power of idle computers to perform specific computations related to critical research around complex biological, environmental and health-related issues. The current projects include Help Fight Childhood Cancer, Clean Energy, and Nutritious Rice for the World, FightAIDS@Home, Help Conquer Cancer, AfricanClimate@Home, and a genomics initiative and research on Dengue Fever.
Another example of our citizenship activities is our employee volunteer initiative, entitled On Demand Community. Since its inception in 2003, over 145,000 employees and retirees have registered and performed almost 10 million hours of volunteer service around the world. This program equips our employee and retiree volunteers with a distinct set of on demand tools based on the successful technology solutions created exclusively by IBM for schools and community agencies. These Web-based tools provide them with a myriad choice of meaningful volunteer opportunities, resources and specific activities designed to help make them more effective volunteers and to offer valuable assistance to schools and not-for-profit organizations.
