IBM Business Model | Business Model Navigator

Overview:

International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) is an American multinational information technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States, with operations in over 170 countries. The company began in 1911 as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR) and was renamed 'International Business Machines' in 1924. IBM manufactures and markets computer hardware, middleware and software, and provides hosting and consulting services in areas ranging from mainframe computers to nanotechnology. IBM is also a major research organization, holding the record for most U.S. patents generated by a business (as of 2018) for 25 consecutive years. Inventions by IBM include the automated teller machine (ATM), the floppy disk, the hard disk drive, the magnetic stripe card, the relational database, the SQL programming language, the UPC barcode, and dynamic random-access memory (DRAM). The IBM mainframe, exemplified by the System/360, was the dominant computing platform during the 1960s and 1970s.

Industries:

Information Technology

Hardware

Similar firms (based on pattern co-occurrence):

2 shared patterns

4 shared patterns

2 shared patterns

3 shared patterns

2 shared patterns

Business Model Patterns:

Guaranteed Availability

How they do it: IBM services its customers with solutions to limit their downtime risks and guarantees its customers the security of their data. One example is the IBM Storwize system which are employed in business-critical environments all over the world. Here, IBM developed a system which safely backs up clients data in a continuous way. The solution can be individualized and scaled to individual business needs.

License

How they do it: As IBM is the business with most patents generated per year in the US, it provides customers to license some of its IP. This includes not only the licensing of the patent but also access to IBM’s team of researchers, scientists and developers and further infrastructure to generate revenues with the IP.

Open Source

How they do it: IBM is one of the pioneers of open source development and showed how open source projects can be successful e.g. with the operating system Linux, which follows the open source approach. IBM runs a platform for open source projects and has released some of its technologies under open source licenses. The platform enables developers and researchers to collaboratively develop solutions.

Solution Provider

How they do it: IBM acts as a full range solution provider for its products. For example its Global Technology Services business unit which provides its clients strategic outsourcing and other support services, includes both the provision of hardware capacity as well as maitenance and support services.

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