The Hardware Story
IBM computers are central to the operations of many of the UK's leading public and private sector organisations, providing the powerful technology that makes them work.
If you look into the data centres that run business-critical processing for many of the nation's most successful enterprises, you'll find the IBM logo.
As a company that has its roots in hardware manufacturing, it's not surprising that, today, IBM still offers the broadest range or servers in the industry and has the most comprehensive portfolio of data storage products.
Its industry leadership is confirmed by the fact that IBM holds the number one position worldwide in server revenue - almost 30% - and has held this independently-verified position for eight consecutive years.
The range of servers includes: mainframes, Intel-processed based servers, UNIX systems, integrated application servers and Blade servers; and meets the needs of small and mid-size companies as well as massive, multi-national enterprises.
Industry analysts report that IBM also holds the number one position for revenue share in the combined disk and tape storage market.
IBM is a keen supporter of open standards, and is committed to Open Source computing. Across the Belgium, it supports hundreds of organisations running Linux.
IBM's systems account for almost half of the world's most powerful supercomputers. IBM's Blue Gene/L is at the very top of the scale, with an unrivalled sustained performance of 280.6 Teraflops - trillions of floating point calculations per second.
Around the world, IBM's supercomputers are at work, helping governments, research institutions and universities to tackle the big issues of society as well as business, including healthcare, astronomy and space.
For instance, researchers at one university are using a commercial version of Blue Gene to study several scientific fields, including the development of diseases such as Alzheimer's and Cystic Fibrosis. And scientists at a research institution are using Blue Gene to tackle 'grand challenge' problems such as more accurate climate change modelling, detailed molecular modelling, nano-technology, and biomedical science.