IBM 2000 Annual Report Download - page 25

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steve mills
Senior Vice President, IBM Software Group
In the early days of 2001,
john kelly, doug elix
and steve mills sat
down to talk about the
wild ride of the year past
and the opportunities of
the year ahead.
lessons learned
Kelly: For us, the big lesson of 2000 was
that if you have leadership technology,
“build it and they will come.” In the first
quarter, I’m sitting near 70 percent
uti-
lization
—
which is death in my business
—
but we knew what was coming, and just
kept building. In the third quarter, it
popped. We thought we were in a high-
growth business; what we didn’t realize
was we were in a hypergrowth business.
Even that’s an understatement.
Elix: Tell me about it. In services, we
worked through a transition that spanned
three quarters. We’d had great business
in systems integration and even doing
Y2K work, and then suddenly we had
to transition all of those services com-
pletely to e-business
-
oriented services,
hire thousands of people and retrain
thousands of our own people. It wasn’t
until the fourth quarter that we saw the
momentum return to the business.
Kelly: But in any one of our cases,
we’ve got to continue to have confidence
that the business is going to grow.