A top hybrid and multicloud vendor, boosted by its acquisition of Red Hat in 2019, IBM’s deep-pocketed global customer base has the resources to invest heavily in AI. IBM has an extensive AI portfolio, highlighted by the Watson platform, with strengths in conversational AI, machine learning, and automation. The company invests deeply in R&D and has a treasure trove of patents; its AI alliance with MIT will also likely fuel advances.
The International Business Machines Corporation (doing business as IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American multinational technology corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York and is present in over 175 countries. It specializes in computer hardware, middleware, and software, and provides hosting and consulting services in areas ranging from mainframe computers to nanotechnology. IBM is the largest industrial research organization in the world, with 19 research facilities across a dozen countries, and held the record for most annual U.S. patents generated by a business for 29 consecutive years from 1993 to 2021.
IBM was founded in 1911 as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR), a holding company of manufacturers of record-keeping and measuring systems. It was renamed “International Business Machines” in 1924 and soon became the leading manufacturer of punch-card tabulating systems. For the next several decades, IBM would become an industry leader in several emerging technologies, including electric typewriters, electromechanical calculators, and personal computers. During the 1960s and 1970s, the IBM mainframe, exemplified by the System/360, was the dominant computing platform, and the company produced 80 percent of computers in the U.S. and 70 percent of computers worldwide.
After entering the multipurpose microcomputer market in the 1980s with the IBM Personal Computer, which became the most popular standard for personal computers, IBM began losing its market dominance to emerging competitors. Beginning in the 1990s, the company began downsizing its operations and divesting from commodity production, most notably selling its personal computer division to the Lenovo Group in 2005. IBM has since concentrated on computer services, software, supercomputers, and scientific research. Since 2000, its supercomputers have consistently ranked among the most powerful in the world, and in 2001 it became the first company to generate more than 3,000 patents in one year, beating this record in 2008 with over 4,000 patents.[12] As of 2022, the company held 150,000 patents.
As one of the world’s oldest and largest technology companies, IBM has been responsible for several technological innovations, including the automated teller machine (ATM), dynamic random-access memory (DRAM), the floppy disk, the hard disk drive, the magnetic stripe card, the relational database, the SQL programming language, and the UPC barcode. The company has made inroads in advanced computer chips, quantum computing, artificial intelligence, and data infrastructure. IBM employees and alumni have won various recognitions for their scientific research and inventions, including six Nobel Prizes and six Turing Awards.
International Business Machines Corp (IBM) is a New York, US-based company founded by Charles Ranlett Flint. Flint started the company in 1911 as the Computing Tabulating Recording Company. It was renamed IBM in 1924. The company has operations in 170 countries. It came out with its IPO in January 2015.
IBM manufactures and sells computer software and hardware. It also offers application, process design and operations, technology consulting and support, cloud, digital workplace and network services, strategy, and design solutions. IBM operates in four segments: Cloud & Cognitive Software, Systems, Global Financing and Global Business Services. The Cloud & Cognitive Software segment offers data, artificial intelligence and secure cloud solutions.
The Systems segment equips clients with infrastructure platforms for hybrid multi-cloud and enterprise AI workloads. This segment collaborates with IBM Research to design advanced semiconductor and systems technology. The Global Financing segment is engaged in remanufacturing, remarketing and financing mainly through IBM Credit LLC. The Global Business Services segment offers consulting, business process and application management services.
The company has a strong footprint in the area of research. IBM holds the record for most annual US patents by a business for 28 consecutive years (as of 2020). Some of its notable inventions include the Automated Teller Machine (ATM), the hard disk drive, the floppy disk, the SQL programming language, and the UPC barcode. IBM is amongst the 30 companies included in the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
The company is one of the world’s largest employers, with 70% of its employees based overseas. The company is nicknamed Big Blue owing to their blue logo and the blue suits with white shirts dress code followed by the employees.
End-to-End Quantum Safe Solution
IBM’s new Quantum Safe technology is an end-to-end solution designed to help clients remain secure now and throughout their “quantum-safe journey towards the post-quantum era.” Sounds good, but what exactly does this mean?
While some quantum computing and quantum-like solutions are available, the market is still in very early days. However, potential dangers lie ahead as quantum technologies mature and become increasingly available to valid business and government agencies, as well as to bad actors, including rogue states and organized cybercriminals.
The question, then, is how organizations can best protect themselves against quantum-based cyberattacks during this transition. These attacks include “harvest now, decrypt later” schemes designed to steal highly encrypted data in the hopes that quantum-based tools can eventually be used to decode it.
In essence, IBM Quantum Safe is designed to thwart such efforts with various tools, including:
- IBM Quantum Safe Explorer enables organizations to scan source and object code to locate cryptographic assets, dependencies and vulnerabilities. Further, they can build a Cryptography Bill of Materials (CBOM) that enables teams to view potential risks and aggregate them in a central location.
- IBM Quantum Safe Advisor allows the creation of dynamic or operational views of cryptographic assets to analyze cryptographic posture and compliance to prioritize risks and to guide remediation efforts.
- IBM Quantum Safe Remediator helps organizations deploy and test best practice-based quantum-safe remediation patterns to understand their potential impacts on systems and assets prior to deploying quantum safe cryptography solutions.
IBM also announced its Quantum Safe Roadmap, which is designed to help clients understand new threats and solutions and support them through this security transition.