International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) is an American multinational technology and consulting company headquartered in Armonk, New York, with more than 350,000 employees serving clients in 170 countries.
On October 8, 2020 IBM announced it was spinning off the Managed Infrastructure Services unit of its Global Technology Services division into a new public company, an action expected to be completed by the end of 2021.Prior to the announced split, IBM produced and sold computer hardware, middleware and software, and provided hosting and consulting services in areas ranging from mainframe computers to nanotechnology. It is also a major research organization, as of 2020 holding the record for most U.S. patents generated by a business for 27 consecutive years. Inventions by IBM include 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.
IBM, sometimes referred to as Big Blue, is one of 30 companies included in the Dow Jones Industrial Average and one of the world's largest employers, with over 352,600 employees as of 2019. At least 70% of IBM employees, known as "IBMers", are based outside the United States, with the largest number in India. IBM employees have been awarded five Nobel Prizes, six Turing Awards, ten National Medals of Technology (USA) and five National Medals of Science (USA).