IBM 2000 Annual Report Download - page 27

the advantage of scale
Kelly: There are challenges built into being
one company with a portfolio of businesses,
as opposed to being a pure play, self-standing,
single-minded operation. The challenges are
dwarfed by the advantages, but they’re still
there to be managed.
One of them is this balance you have
to strike: Make sure you capitalize on
the assets of the rest of the company, be
an asset yourself, and balance that with
the focus you need to succeed within your
market segment.
Elix: Exactly. We’re the biggest, most capable
services organization in the world, but we
can’t and won’t go in front of a customer
without the right alignment across the cor-
poration. When we start to put together a
solution, being hardwired to colleagues who
have great customer relationships at one end
and who are actually building the products
and technologies at the other end is a trump
card we play again and again and again.
compete? cooperate? yes.
Kelly: A lot of my best customers are some
of IBM’s biggest competitors in the server
and box business, and no one has ever con-
strained me from selling our great technology
to them. So I just keep driving.
Mills: Yeah, us too. It’s a diverse world. We
have to coexist with, support and sell to
companies that other parts of the product
or services organization compete with.
But we certainly jump on opportunities
where we can leverage another part of
IBM, because we know software can pull
hardware and services into a sale.
Elix: Right. We made this decision
many years ago. We are a multi-
faceted company that is in many
product areas, as well as many
service areas.
Kelly: I mean, some parts of the business
have tough challenges in this — some of the
product houses. But there are lots of areas
where it’s positive synergy. One of my
biggest customers is somebody that Doug
calls on, so the better Doug does, the more
components I sell.
managing the future
Mills: Thinking customers today understand
that you can’t implement a transformed
e-business enterprise unless you get the
infrastructure underneath it running. They
also know they need a partner that can look
across all these processes and see how to
put them together. Infrastructure is going
to be a winning play for us this year.
Elix: For us, outsourcing is back strong.
We cracked the market in Asia
— in a way,
we created the market in Asia. Then there’s
e-sourcing (see page 33), and the business
transformation that underpins all of the
infrastructure and hardware and software
changes. That holds tremendous opportu-
nities for growth.
Kelly: We’ve planted ourselves in an incredibly
fast-growing segment. So whether it’s chips
for servers, chips for infrastructure for the
Internet, or chips for pervasive devices, we’re
parked in the sweet spot. And we have a
broad spectrum of customers in each segment.
We’re ready to go wherever this thing is
going to go.
You can’t live through a year like 2000
and not learn a lot. One of the advantages
that the three of us have had is that we grew
up in our businesses. We have a gut instinct
for it, so we can make decisions
— even big
ones
— faster.