Interesting Facts about Indonesia

Stupas at Borobudur, the world's largest Buddhist temple, overlook Java's jungles.

Interesting Facts about Indonesia: If you planning to visit Indonesia or wanted to know really Interesting Facts about Indonesia, here you are at the right place. Check out: 

• Boasting the world's largest Muslim population, this vast archipelago between Asia and Australia harbors a highly diverse people speaking more than 300 languages.
•  From glittering beaches to isolated jungle villages, it offers endless studies in extremes.
• The influence of the Dutch, who united the island chain in 1900, may be felt everywhere
• Japan's wartime occupation, happily, is a distant memory.
• Located at the intersection of two tectonic plates, the islands are prone to earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.
• Life is defined by easeful charm and a warm sense of welcome.
• Indonesia is the world's largest archipelago consisting of many thousands of islands. Around six thousand of the islands are inhabited.
• The Indonesian name for Indonesia is "Tanah Air Kita" - Our Land and Water.
• Indonesia's national motto is Unity in Diversity.
• The highest point in Indonesia is Puncak Jaya (5,030 m) in the highlands of Papua.
• Indonesia's region of Papua (formerly Irian Jaya) shares the island of New Guinea with Papua New Guinea.
• The Indonesian administrative divisions of Kalimantan share Borneo with Malaysia and Brunei.
• The islands of New Guinea and Borneo are two of the largest islands in the world.
• The eruption of Mount Tambora, on Sumbawa Island, in 1815 was the most powerful volcanic eruption in recorded history. 1816 was known as the "Year Without Summer" because of the global climatic effects of the eruption.
• In 1883 the volcanic island of Krakatoa (part of the Indonesian archipelago) was destroyed by a volcanic eruption. This caused a tidal wave that killed over thirty thousand people.
• Earthquakes and volcanic eruptions sometimes cause a tsunami, a giant wave which can swamp islands and coastal settlements. A tsunami can travel as fast as 800 kph.
• Indonesia is part of the Ring of Fire which includes about seventy-five percent of all the world's volcanoes. (The rim of the Pacific Basin is ringed with volcanoes, from Alaska through the USA, Mexico and South America, then on to New Zealand and up to Japan and Russia.).
• In the early 1890s Eugene Dubois discovered a skull and thigh bone of Homo erectus in East Java. Dubois published his findings of "Java Man" in 1894, claiming that Homo erectus was an ancestor of modern humans.
• The Sangiran Early Man Site, on the World Heritage List, is estimated to have been inhabited one and a half million years ago. Half of the world's hominid fossils have been found at Sangiran in Java.
• Marco Polo was one of the first Europeans to visit Indonesia.
• Europeans went to Indonesia in search of spices. Spices were a very valuable commodity in Europe.
• Indonesia is one the world's largest producers of nutmeg.
• By the late eighteenth century "Indonesia" was part of the Dutch colonial empire and known as the Netherlands East Indies.
• Indonesia's island of Bali did not come under the control of the Netherlands until 1906. During the Dutch capture of the island many thousands of Balinese were killed. Puputan Square in Denpasar is named after the suicidal battle of the Balinese aristocracy in their struggle against the Dutch.
• Between 1811 and 1816 (during the Napoleonic Wars), "Indonesia" came under Britishrule but was returned to the Dutch.
• After the War (1939-1945) Indonesia declared independence. Sukarno, the independence leader, became the country's first president.
• Following independence, the Dutch remained in control of the western part of New Guinea (now Papua). This territory was eventually passed to Indonesia under a United Nations agreement (1963).
• In 1975 East Timor gained independence from the Portuguese but was annexed by Indonesia in 1976. East Timor voted for independence in 1999 but did not regain independence until 2002.
• In October 2002 a terrorist bomb in Bali (Kuta town) killed over 180 people. Three years later, suicide bombings in Bali killed over twenty people.
• In 2003 a car bomb outside the Marriott Hotel in Jakarta killed fourteen people. A year later, another car bomb in Jakarta outside the Australian embassy killed nine people.
• On 26 December 2004, a quake occurred under the sea near Aceh in north Indonesia (8.9 on the Richter scale); this produced tsunamis causing flooding and destruction in Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Maldives, Myanmar, Thailand, Seychelles, Sri Lanka and the east coast of Africa (Kenya and Somalia).
• An earthquake measuring 8.7 on the Richter scale, off the coast of Sumatra, killed between one and two thousand people in March 2005. Many of the victims lived on the small island of Nias.
• Towards the end of May 2006 an earthquake measuring 6.2 struck the Indonesian island of Java killing over three thousand people.
• A tsunami, caused by an undersea earthquake (magnitude 7.7), struck the island of Java on 17 July 2006 killing over 500 people.
• In November 2008 an earthquake near the island of Sulawesi, magnitude 7.5, killed at least six people.
• An earthquake of magnitude 7.6 occurred near the north coast of Papua in January 2009. Another earthquate, 7.9 magnitude, struck off the Indonesian island of Sumatra in September.
• In November 2008 three Islamic militants who were convicted of carrying out the 2002 Bali bombings were executed.
• In July 2009 President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono was re-elected. Suicide bomb attacks on the Marriott and Ritz-Carlton hotels in Jakarta killed nine people and injured many others. In September police shot dead Indonesia’s most wanted Islamist militant Noordin Mohammad Top.
• In March 2010 Police shot dead Dulmatin, the last main suspect of the 2002 Bali bombings. In 2010 US President Barack Obama visited and hailed Indonesia as an example of how a developing nation can embrace democracy.

Country Overview: Indonesia

Population: 221,932,000

Capital: Jakarta; 13,194,000

Area: 1,922,570 square kilometers (742,308 square miles)

Language: Bahasa Indonesia, English, Dutch, Javanese, and other local dialects

Religion: Muslim, Protestant, Roman Catholic, Hindu, Buddhist

Currency: Indonesian rupiah

Life Expectancy: 68

GDP per Capita: U.S. $3,100

Literacy Percent: 89

Indonesia is a vast equatorial archipelago of 17,000 islands extending 5,150 kilometers (3,200 miles) east to west, between the Indian and Pacific Oceans in Southeast Asia. The largest islands are Sumatra, Java, Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo), Sulawesi, and the Indonesian part of New Guinea (known as Papua or Irian Jaya). Islands are mountainous with dense rain forests, and some have active volcanoes. Most of the smaller islands belong to larger groups, like the Moluccas (Spice Islands).

Indonesia, the world's fourth most populous nation, is 86 percent Muslim—and the largest Islamic country, though it is a secular state. Indonesians are separated by seas and clustered on islands. The largest cluster is on Java, with some 130 million inhabitants (60 percent of the country's population) on an island the size of New York State. Sumatra, much larger than Java, has less than a third of its people. Ethnically the country is highly diverse, with over 580 languages and dialects—but only 13 have more than one million speakers.

After independence from the Netherlands in 1945, the new republic confronted a high birthrate, low productivity, and illiteracy—areas in which progress has since been made. The government used a "transmigration" policy to address uneven population distribution by relocating millions of people from Java to other islands. Unity and stability are improving, although outer areas of the archipelago resent domination by Java. The Asian financial crisis hit Indonesia extremely hard. Public unrest, including violent rioting, forced President Suharto—in office since 1967—to resign in May 1998. One year later Indonesia conducted its first democratic elections since 1955.

The democratic government faces many problems after years of military dictatorship. Secessionists in the regions of Papua and Aceh (northwest tip of Sumatra) had been encouraged by East Timor's (now Timor-Leste) 1999 success in breaking away after 25 years of Indonesian military occupation. A 2005 peace agreement with Aceh separatists led to 2006 elections and a cooling of the tension. Militants on Papua still engage in a low-level insurgency. Militant Islamic groups have become active in recent years, and religious conflict between Muslims and Christians recently flared in Sulawesi and the Moluccas. The island of Bali, a center of Hindu culture, suffered a terrorist bomb blast in 2002 that killed more than 200 people—mostly tourists. Three years later, in 2005, the country was hit by the devastating Indian Ocean tsunami, which killed more than 220,000 Indonesians.

Export earnings from oil and natural gas help the economy, and Indonesia is a member of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). Tourists come to see the rich diversity of plants and wildlife—some, like the giant Komodo dragon and the Javan rhinoceros, exist nowhere else.

Check out Interesting Facts about Indonesia in Pictures:

Borobudur Temple - Construction of Java’s Borobudur Temple, one of the world’s largest Buddhist monuments and a World Heritage site, began in the eighth century, under the Sailendra dynasty. Framed by four volcanoes, it stands 105 feet (32 meters) high.

Mount Semeru and Mount Bromo - Some Indonesians believe that belching volcanoes such as Mount Semeru (in background) and Mount Bromo (in foreground) are portals to a subterranean world that has shaped not only Indonesia’s landscape but also its beliefs and culture. A long exposure time captured stars in this photo—and the brief balanced light from both a fading moon and a brightening eastern sky.

Goa Gajah, Bali - The intricately carved walls of Goa Gajah (Elephant Cave) on the island of Bali depict leaves, waves, animals, and demons.

Istiqlal Mosque, Jakarta - Jakarta’s Istiqlal Mosque, one of the largest mosques in the world, can hold more than 70,000 worshippers at a time. Arab traders brought Islam to the region a thousand years ago. Today Indonesia is the world's most populous Muslim country.

Minangkabau Women - Young Minangkabau women in traditional clothes wait to perform a dance in Bagor.

Borobudur Temple - Borobudur Temple was damaged in an earthquake and buried for centuries under volcanic ash. Excavations began in the early 20th century.

Rice Paddies - Rice paddies cover terraces built into an Indonesian hillside. Farmers on Java are surrounded by more than 30 volcanoes, which provide the rich volcanic ash that allows them to harvest three crops of rice in a season—unlike farmers on neighboring Borneo, who have only one volcano.

Balinese Dancers - Opulent costumes adorn performers in a Balinese barong dance, which brings mythological characters to life in a struggle between good and evil, complete with choreographed fight scenes reminiscent of professional wrestling.

Carved Mask - Bali craftsmen create everything from carvings to paintings in hopes of catching a tourist’s eye. Traditional carved masks, called topeng, are also used in Balinese dances.

Coffee Plantation, West Java - A woman pauses in an intricately carved doorway on a coffee plantation in west Java. Draped across 3,200 miles (5,150 kilometers), Indonesia is a cloth of many colors, comprising five main islands and 30 smaller archipelagoes, with a collection of cultures as diverse as its geography. Historically the center of wealth and power, the island of Java still dominates, though 250 unique languages still survive.

Orangutans - Orangutans are native only to Indonesia and Malaysia. The endangered great apes have lost much of their habitat to deforestation.

Raja Ampat Islands - The islands of Raja Ampat may well be home to the greatest biodiversity in the world, with almost 600 species of coral, abundant plant life, and unique creatures, such as a shark that walks on its fins and a shrimp that looks like a praying mantis.

Komodo Dragon - Komodo National Park is the last sanctuary for the endemic Komodo dragon, native only to Indonesia. Largest of all lizards, it can reach a fearsome ten feet (three meters) in length.

Nusa Dua Temple, Bali - Indonesian women take part in a procession to Nusa Dua temple in southern Bali, carrying offerings atop their heads. Southern Bali is also known for its beaches and five-star hotels.

Mount Penanggungan - In a sacred pool on the slopes of Java’s Mount Penanggungan, men bathe beside statues of Sri and Lakshmi, the consorts of the Hindu god Vishnu.

Coral Reef, Sulawesi - Scuba divers explore a coral reef off Manado Tua Island. The island nations of the tropical western Pacific cradle the richest coral life on the planet. The development of reefs owes much to oceanic volcanoes such as Manado Tua, near the northeastern tip of Sulawesi. The submerged slopes of the volcanoes give corals a toehold on which to grow.

Village Initiation - Young men in the Bali village of Tenganan take part in perang pandan, a traditional ritual.

Pura Ulun Danu Temple, Bali - The water temple of Pura Ulun Danu on Lake Bratan in Bali serves the faithful in the mountainous area near Bedugul.

Source: National Geographic & World Info Zone

Katy Perry's "Last Friday Night" Video Gives '80s Co-Stars Much-Needed Search Spikes

A job and search spikes? Not bad for the co-stars in Katy Perry's latest John Hughes-inspired music video "Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.)," some whom have faded away more than others. Since the video debuted on Sunday, her credited cast members--including '80s teen icon Debbie Gibson, sax man Kenny G, boy band Hanson, and "Glee" actors Darren Criss and Kevin McHale--have experienced huge Internet search spikes as a result.

Set in the 1980s (Wii and laptop aside), Katy Perry's brace-faced, terminally geeky 13-year-old alter-ego Kathy Beth Terry undergoes a classic teen-movie makeover for the party of the year in "Last Friday Night." With the help of her BFF, the appropriately cast "Friday" singer Rebecca Black, Kathy Beth loses her headgear, mustache, and denim jumpsuit for skintight neons and teased-to-the-heavens big hair. Like something out of a teen version of The Hangover (and pretty inappropriate for a teen!), the next morning finds Kathy Beth waking up to a trashed house, a football player in her bed, and a struggle to piece together the details of her epic Friday night.

Since the video debuted, Yahoo! searches for Perry's co-stars have skyrocketed: Debbie Gibson, who plays Kathy Beth's mom, went up 111 percent; her crowdsurfing "Uncle Kenny," Kenny G, was up 76 percent; Rebecca Black went up 66 percent, and house party band Hanson was up 56 percent. 

A large portion of Katy Perry's fans likely weren't even alive in the '80s or are old enough to remember the era of Hanson, which could be the reason fueling some of the spikes. Nonetheless, the guest stars who haven't been in the public eye as much lately are benefitting from the garnered interest.

While the biggest search spike award goes to Darren Criss (up a whopping 3,371 percent), that's likely due to his current hotness factor as a "Glee" character and his guest judge appearance on "The Glee Project" TV show, which also debuted Sunday night. And knowing Internet curiosity, the spike was probably pushed even further from searches for viral video footage of the actor gettingpulled offstage by a fan last Sunday at a "Glee! Live!" concert in D.C.

Sadly, Corey Feldman, who plays Kathy Beth's father in the "Last Friday" video and probably is the biggest of all the '80s cameos, experienced no spikes in search. Also, in true high school form, Kevin McHale, who plays the nerdy, Medieval-daydreaming romantic counterpart to Kathy, didn't have much of a change in search popularity either. But in the video, he does beat the jock and get his girl.

Hopefully this won't be the last we see of Kathy Beth Terry. While Katy could've easily made a typical racy party video in this case, or gone with the omnipresent popstar-in-space theme of her "E.T." clip with Kanye West, "Last Friday Night" is a welcome change, showcasing the singer's comedic side and tapping into '80s nostalgia.

However, because the 26-year-old was only 5 years old in 1989, most of her actual nostalgia comes from the 1990s, when she was a teen. "T.G.I.F." was a popular block of family TV comedies in the '90s, Hanson broke out in 1997, and Kathy Beth's Twitter accountgushes about '90s crushes JTT ("Home Improvement's" Jonathan Taylor Thomas) and Devon Sawa. But being of the same generation as Perry, I can say she definitely touched upon her peers' tween tastes very accurately.

Source: Yahoo Music

Interesting Facts about IBM: 100 Years of History

Interesting Facts about IBM: 100 Years of Innovation 

It’s rare to last 100 years in a business, but to last 100 years in the technology business is next to impossible. Well, IBM will officially pull off the impossible in mid-June when the company celebrates 100 years in business.

When the company was formed as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (C-T-R) in 1911, its founders probably never dreamed that it would last 100 years. Yet, when the company was merely 13 years old, its leadership sought a name that signaled a global presence, so C-T-R became International Business Machines (IBM) in 1924.

And IBM has done more than survive—it has thrived. As IBM Senior Vice President and Group Executive for Software and Systems Steve Mills told eWEEK, IBM is still standing while former industry darlings—including Digital Equipment Corp., Wang, Prime and Data General—have vanished.

IBM has managed this seemingly impossible feat by adapting to the demands of the times and adopting new technologies and new approaches to the marketplace. Even more important, IBM has focused on its customers, Mills said.

“IBM’s great achievement from my perspective is that it has been able to morph and change based on understanding its customers and partnering with those customers,” said Judith Hurwitz, CEO of Hurwitz & Associates, who has watched IBM for decades. “When IBM had its near death experience, that was the period of time when it lost touch with customers.”

To ensure that it never again takes its eye off its customers, IBM has made them an integral part of its strategies, including its 2015 road map. That plan for the future includes four primary areas: growth markets, analytics, next-generation data centers and the cloud, and the IBM Smarter Planet strategy.

Sharon Nunes, vice president of Smarter Cities Strategy & Solutions,at IBM, said the Smarter Planet initiatives—particularly the Smarter Cities—draw buy-in because the results impact people where they live and work.

That’s certainly true of Roy Buol, mayor of Dubuque, Iowa, who told eWEEK: “In 2009, we chose IBM as our partner to develop the tools our residents need to make better decisions about how they use resources like water, electricity and natural gas. The goal of ‘Smarter Sustainable Dubuque’ is to create policies and programs that address environmental and ecological integrity, economic prosperity, and social and cultural vibrancy to create a community that is viable, livable and equitable. “The individual building blocks of this strategy relate to energy, water, mobility, air, resources, nature, green economy, eco-literacy, food and shelter.”

IBM addressed these building blocks in September 2009, when the company and Dubuque announced a new collaboration aimed at making the city of 60,000 one of the first “smarter” sustainable cities in the United States.

The partnership is already paying off. Buol said the IBM analytics and cloud computing technology his city deployed in 2010 helped reduce water utilization by 6.6 percent and increased leak detection and response eightfold. 

IBM’s formidable push into business analytics seems prescient given the recent performance of the Watson system on Jeopardy! IBM is currently looking for additional applications for the system’s DeepQA technology, and health care seems to be the next logical step. Dr. Eliot Siegel, professor and vice chairman of the University of Maryland School of Medicine’s diagnostic radiology department, said he hopes to see Watson-powered physician’s assistants in the near future.

Interesting Facts about  IBM: 100 Years of Innovation - Where It All Began  

Of course, IBM wouldn’t be where it is today without another Watson: Thomas J. Watson Sr.,  who joined C-T-R as general manager in 1914 and later became IBM’s first—and arguably most impactful—chairman. Watson shaped the company and established a culture and core set of values that continue to stamp IBM today.

In the new book on IBM’s 100 years in business, Making the World Better, by Kevin Many, Steve Hamm and Jeffrey M. O’Brien, Hamm wrote: “Since its early days, IBM has been operated based on a set of core beliefs. IBM would distinguish itself with its respect for the individual, its pursuit of excellence in all things and its commitment to providing the best customer service.

“These values were baked into the core DNA by Thomas Watson Sr., who built the near-failing organization of 1914 into an industrial giant with staying power. And that DNA has taken hold in millions of employees over the course of 100 years.”

Watson Sr. also adopted a one-word mantra: THINK, which—written in block letters—appeared in IBM facilities around the world. That mantra encouraged IBMers not only to think, but to think big. And, led by Watson Sr. and later by his son, Thomas Watson Jr., IBM launched a culture of thinking big and making big bets.

One of Watson’s first big bets was to remain aggressive during the Great Depression and to keep up the company’s pace of building its tabulating machines. The bet paid off when, coming out of the depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act, and businesses began buying IBM machines to handle the information processing requirements of Social Security.

As these bets paid off on an ongoing basis, “The company has continued to remake itself over time,” Mills said. “The strategy is to keep shifting and adapting.” He added that over the last few decades, IBM has transformed itself from a hardware business to one that’s more focused on software and services.

A Near-Death Experience 

In the mid-1980s to early 1990s, a combination of complacency, weariness from battling antitrust claims and missing the boat on client/server, among other things, caused IBM to lose focus, market share and revenue. Marie Wieck, the company’s general manager of application integration middleware and WebSphere, said IBM’s focus on the mainframe at the expense of being late to the client/server game hurt. 

“IBM misread the client/server architecture,” added Amy Wohl, an industry analyst who has followed IBM for many years. “While Compaq was selling a server or two into mid-market and large companies and then coming back to sell some more, IBM missed this [market] until the 1990s, missing an important business opportunity.”

The company eventually ousted then-CEO John F. Akers and brought in Louis V. Gerstner Jr., a former McKinsey consultant and CEO of RJR Nabisco. Gerstner quickly slashed headcount and spending, and reset the company’s focus on the customer.

Samuel J. Palmisano, IBM’s current chairman and CEO, followed Gerstner, and quickly established three new values for the modern IBM company: “dedication to every client’s success; innovation that matters—for our company and for the world; and trust and personal responsibility in all relationships.”

Interesting Facts about  IBM: 100 Years of Innovation - Betting on System/360  

Change was certainly at work when Watson Jr. made one of IBM’s biggest bets: setting its engineers on a course to build the System/360 mainframe. That system was a risk because it would cannibalize IBM’s existing product and require greater investment from customers, while also costing $5 billion to build—$34 billion in today’s dollars.

Watson Jr. later called the System/360, which launched in 1964, “the riskiest decision I ever made.” But it paid off  handsomely, enabling IBM to dominate that space for the next two decades.

Jeff Frey, an IBM Fellow and director of System z architecture and design, said the System/360 “set the stage for large system computing.” The System/360 also saw “the introduction of virtual memory and massive virtualization and brings us to where we are today,” he added.

Moreover, the System/360 introduced OS/360, the mainframe operating system that evolved into the z/OS (the operating system for the new system z mainframes) and “has evolved over time more than any single piece of software in history,” Frey claimed. Delivering software for the System/360 led to other software advances, such as transaction processing monitors and databases: IMS and relational databases, he said.

In the late 1980s, IBM had to decide whether to continue using bipolar technology to build its processors for the mainframe or to move to CMOS. The company placed another big bet and moved to CMOS, which led to IBM restructuring its software. That enabled the company to deliver Parallel Sysplex, which, in turn, allowed a cluster of IBM mainframes to act together as a single system image with z/OS.

Like IBM, the mainframe keeps reinventing itself. Last year, IBM introduced the zEnterprise System, which can manage a virtual collection of heterogeneous hardware as if it were one system, Frey said.

Hardware has always been the foundation of IBM, pointed out Rod Adkins, senior vice president of IBM’s Systems and Technology Group, adding that it will continue to be a critical building block as the company evolves—particularly for the cloud, Big Data and analytics.

Interesting Facts about  IBM: 100 Years of Innovation - Opening Up to Linux 

IBM also placed a bet on Linux when it put the open-source operating system on its mainframes in 1999. Bob Sutor, IBM’s vice president of open source and Linux, likes to tell the story of how Linux and open-source software gained a foothold at IBM. In 1999, he said, Gerstner was focused on enabling IBM to compete “in this amazingly heterogeneous world.”

Sutor added that Linux “started to get the attention of our senior execs, people like Sam Palmisano and Irving Wladawsky-Berger. It had the chance of breaking down silos, and it fit in with the general ideas of the time. We had Java for application portability, XML for data portability and then Linux for hardware portability.”

IBM also began to contribute to the open-source community, primarily by delivering software in support of open standards.

For Java developers, IBM played Santa Claus by pulling from its VisualAge product and leveraging its acquisition of Object Technology International to deliver the Eclipse IDE (integrated development environment). IBM then open-sourced the IDE in 2001 and spun out the Eclipse Foundation in 2004. Eclipse has since fostered a massive ecosystem.

Focusing on Software

In 2010, IBM earned $22.5 billion in revenue from software. According to some industry reports and an analysis of the financial statements of leading software vendors, if the IBM Software Group were an independent entity, it would be the second largest software company in the world, behind Microsoft.

It wasn’t always that way. In fact, IBM used to give software away as part of its hardware sales.

“Software was the incremental build off the deep domain knowledge,” said Mills, who has been running IBM’s software business since 1988 and heading the IBM Software Group since its establishment in 1995. In 2010, Mills was tasked with running the overall systems business as well.

Even though IBM was producing software in the 1950s, it didn’t focus heavily on it until the late 1980s and only got serious about software in the mid-1990s. Meanwhile, the company began to adopt agile methods for developing its products.

During this timeframe, IBM had struck a partnership with Microsoft to develop a new PC operating system: OS/2. They struck the deal in 1985, but by 1990, Microsoft pulled out to focus on Windows, which left OS/2 to wither.

Needing a foundation for its new software business, IBM approached Lotus with aspirations to acquire the productivity software maker. The offer was rebuffed, but, after a hostile takeover bid, IBM got Lotus for $3.5 billion in 1995. IBM then acquired Tivoli in 1996 and Rational in 2002. The IBM Software Group now consists of five primary groups or brands: Information Management software, Tivoli, Lotus, Rational and WebSphere.

“IBM bet big on software in the late 1980s and early 1990s and decided to focus on a consistent set of services across platform,” said Hurwitz of Hurwitz & Associates. “The company broke down stove pipes between organizations and started to focus on a holistic IBM that focused more on a customer-benefit view rather than technology business units. This has paid off well.

“IBM also made significant investments in big software plays in the infrastructure space, rather than in the traditional packaged applications market. This gave IBM the luxury of moving into what it calls Smarter Planet, which is focused on business best practices implemented in software. I think this was a very smart move.”

Interesting Facts about IBM: 100 Years of Innovation - The Business of E-Business 

Microsoft saw Netscape’s delivery of a browser to access the Internet as a threat to its Windows monopoly and moved to blunt it by integrating its own Internet Explorer browser into Windows. In contrast, IBM viewed the browser as an opportunity to help organizations conduct business over the Internet.

IBM then coined the term “e-business” and laid out a vision for how e-business could transform the world. “We saw the world shifting toward the browser and had to find a way to articulate that to the world, so we came up with the term ‘e-business,’” said Craig Hayman, general manager of IBM industry solutions.

The company began a massive marketing campaign: In 1998, it spent $28.5 million on Internet advertising. A year later, IBM had 10,000 e-business customers.

At the same time, IBM adopted open standards such as Java, created its WebSphere application server and adopted the Apache HTTP server.

With the success of WebSphere as a platform, IBM moved to adopt Web services as an integration technology and service-oriented architecture as an architectural model. Web services enabled it to bring together the distinct worlds of Microsoft’s .NET with enterprise Java technology.

These moves set the stage for IBM’s new Smarter Commerce strategy, a better way for companies to buy, sell and market their products by integrating operations and enhancing interactions through community, collaboration, process and analytics, Hayman said.

Serious About Services

Services has become the biggest piece of the IBM pie, followed by software and systems. Kerrie Holley, IBM’s CTO for Global Business Services, said IBM’s services unit has been advancing the use of technology in business and government for decades, citing IBM’s support of early NASA missions as proof. But it wasn’t until IBM acquired PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) in 2002 for $3.9 billion that the company got serious about services.

Holley believes three key differentiators make IBM’s services organization stand out: the arsenal of PwC talent, IBM’s deep research organization and the company’s deep repository of assets, which he referred to as “Lego building blocks.” Holley said IBM “can bring thousands of Lego building blocks to the table” to address all manner of engagements. He added that IBM has more than 1,000 researchers focusing on services.

“IBM’s transition to customer focus and its strategic build-up of all three major segments of the tech industry—software, services and hardware—means that it is one of the companies able to provide end-to-end solutions in a unique way,” said Al Hilwa, an analyst with IDC. “No other player has achieved the scale that IBM has across these fronts in tech today.”

What is the foundation of IBM’s success? “I think if you look back at its earliest days, this adaptation aspect of the company and its culture is perhaps the most important thing you can say about IBM,” Mills said. “There are other hundred-year-old institutions where either their industries haven’t changed or they haven’t changed very much.

“IBM is at an all-time high value as a business, and that’s a reflection of change and adaptation. You have to have a learning organization that’s open to change. You have to keep learning and building knowledge.

“I think that positions IBM very well, and we need to sustain that kind of learning culture to get through the next 100 years.”

Check out Videos of the 100 years of IBM History

Source: eWeek & engadget