Acquisitions With Business Transformation In MindAcquisitions With Business Transformation In Mind

To build out its business-performance transformation offerings, and the underlying software that supports them, IBM has been on an acquisition binge. Under CEO Sam Palmisano's watch, IBM has made more than a dozen acquisitions, for an announced total of more than $6 billion (not counting the undisclosed value of private transactions).

Observers say the acquisitions are in line with Palmisano's vision. "He wants it to look like IBM Global Services on steroids," says Enderle Group analyst Rob Enderle. Palmisano sees the growth in business-process outsourcing, he adds. So what's next? Analysts say to watch for more acquisitions of niche-oriented business-services vendors and software companies whose products could enhance IBM's middleware.

Here's a look at some of what IBM has already gained with its purchases:

2004
December: Procurement-services company KeyMRO, which operates a trading network through which companies can purchase everything from travel to office supplies.

August: India's Daksh eServices, an operator of customer contact centers, to capitalize on customers' desire to place nonstrategic functions in low-cost, offshore locations.

July: Alphablox, which further extends IBM's presence in the business-intelligence market. Alphablox software enables customers and their partners to enhance their applications with a visual representation of business data.

April: Schlumberger Business Continuity, the business-continuity operations of oil-services company Schlumberger Ltd., which operates recovery centers in Europe and North America.

April: Candle Corp., which provides software that manages servers and storage devices, adds to IBM's portfolio of Tivoli systems-management tools.

March: Trigo Technologies, a provider of information-management middleware for supply chains.

2003
December: Green Pasture Software, whose content-management system lets users electronically manage, edit, and collaborate on multiple documents simultaneously.

May: Think Dynamics, a privately held software vendor whose system helps businesses allocate processing power where it's most needed.

2002
July: The consulting arm of PricewaterhouseCoopers, which immediately adds about $5 billion in revenue to IBM's top line and gives it an army of some 30,000 consultants with vertical-industry experience.

December: Software-tools developer Rational Software, which lets IBM offer a complete software-development environment to build apps based on open standards such as Linux. Rational tools are used by more than 600,000 software developers.

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