IBM is a renowned American computer manufacturer. Full form of IBM is international business machines.

The founder of IBM was Thomas J. Watson. IBM has achieved immense success in making all kinds of computers, personal computers, mainframe computers and business computers. IBM was formed when three successful companies from the 19th century decided to merge.The three companies were the tabulating machine company, the international time recording company and the computing scale company of America. The new company was the computing, tabulating, recording company. (CTR) in 1911. The Tabulating Machine Company leased some machines to a railway company in 1896. Watson played a central role in establishing what would become the IBM organization and culture. He launched a number of initiatives that collectively demonstrated an unwavering faith in his workers: he hired the company's first disabled worker in 1914, he formed the company's first employee education department in 1916, and in 1915 he introduced his favourite slogan think which quickly became a corporate mantra. The famous open door policy was followed in IBM. . Watson boosted company spirit by encouraging any employee with a complaint to approach him or c for that matter any other company executive. Employee sports teams, family outings and a company band were sponsored by Watson, he believedthat employees were most productive when supported by healthy and supportive families and communities. These initiatives each deeply rooted in Watson's personal values system became core aspects of IBM culture for the remainder of the century. Given the company's geographic growth (including the completion of three manufacturing facilities in Europe), and his own expansive vision, Watson found the CTR name too limiting,. A name of a publication from CTR's Canadian operation caught his eye, and on February 14, 1924, the CTR name was formally changed to International Business Machines Corporation, later to be abbreviated IBM.
A new IBM emerged in the 1950s. With the passing of Founding Father Thomas J. Watson, Sr. on

June 19, 1956 at age 82, IBM experienced its first leadership change in more than four decades. The mantle of chief executive fell to his eldest son, Thomas J Watson Jr., IBM's president since 1952. The new chief executive faced a daunting task. The company was in the midst of a period of rapid technological change, with nascent computer technologies electronic computers, magnetic tape storage, disk drives, programming creating new competitors and market uncertainties. Internally, the company was growing by leaps and bounds, creating organizational pressures and significant management challenges. Lacking the force of personality that Watson, Sr. had long used to bind IBM together, Watson, Jr. and his senior executives privately wondered if the new generation of leadership was up to challenge of managing a company through this tumultuous period.

Information technology and IT infrastructure

The term infrastructure entails all those components that are installed in a company to provide IT services. Infrastructure is combination of hardware software and network. In a typical environment , we have user also known as end users using systems(desktop,laptop) using applications , different kinds of software etc. Not all employees of the company are users but all users are employees of the company. Lets say for instance a user is interacting with a software through desktop computer or a laptop. Applications installed in the desktop/laptop are designed to serve to help the user perform his/her job role. User will be using different software pertaining to their department , for instance an investment banker using excel to do calculation., Customer service department in call center using CRM software to enhance customer service to ensure the next time the customer calls all the information needed is available in advance which saves time and cost of the company. Other than the Desktops/laptops which the employees of the company are using the company would also have heavy duty computers known as servers. The server is running some applications when in use which are accessible by the employees through browser that is web based applications. Normally a company has multiple servers which are running multiple applications. One or more servers of the company are running databases. Databases manage data as the name suggests . Some of the other software that are running on other servers would be interacting with the database server to either retrieve the data or to insert newly entered data into the database and also to update existing data. All the database related activities happen in a database server. Database servers are usually the same as other servers but it has databases installed on it except in cases where vendors manufacture servers that are specially designed to run databases on it meaning appliance, hardware specially designed for that software in this case servers designed specially to run databases. Now comes the question how is every component connected to each other in an IT environment.

The desktop/laptop interact with the server to carry out tasks. The application server need to interact with the database server to manage the data as the application server will have all the application related logic but the data would be residing in the database server and users run multiple applications on desktop/laptop which may need to interact with the application server and the database server and in some case with each other. For instance one user is sharing a screen with other user , a pathway is needed to enable flow of data. That pathway is called a network in an IT environment. Hardware is involved in the network as well, for example routers.

IT infrastructure in IBM IB M offers a different variety of IT services . There is more to hardware server virtualization that can be realized. Apart from resource sharing and server virtualization , much more value can be derived from hardware server virualization . The virtualized and non -virtualized systems is indistinguishable because the system hardware virtualization is integrated well. Information Infrastructure for Databases Online transaction processing (OLTP) database applications form the core of many companies. Service interruptions ,planned and unplanned, have a measurable impact on quarterly profits and bonuses. Storage solutions for databases have high availability requirements. Information Infrastructure for Data Warehousing Data warehouse applications can be large, containing no new data. They can perform complex queries at as faster rate and efficiently. Data warehouse scan require 10 times the storage of the raw data. . Information Infrastructure for Medical Imaging Medical imaging systems require large storage space incase of data that has not been frequently accessed. New images need to be stored at a faster pace so disks with faster speeds are needed for carrying out new tasks. The applications used in medical imaging can be used in tiered storage. Information Infrastructure for PeopleSoft These applications support human resources, enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management. It does not depend on database. Tiered storage can be done for Peoplesoft customers as multiple database copies are needed for them. Information Infrastructure for Storage Virtualization

Customers face problems with highly complex IT infrastructures. IBM storage virtualization helps in this case as here storage is flexible. Here virtualized storage is presented to servers. Data can be easily managed and replicated , so it is easier to work with a variety of storage systems.

Traditional system before upgradation of technology Hollerith tabulating machine It was once used only in census taking , eventually it was applied to industry in 1913. The 80 column IBM punch card-ad rectangular holes, 80 columns with 12 punch locations each, one
character to each column.. In 1964, IBM changed from square to round corners. They came typically in boxes of 2000 cards or as continuous formcards.
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IBM automatic multiplying punch, -It read two factors up to eight decimal digits in length from a card and punched their product onto a blank field of the same card. It could subtract and add as well as multiply. It had no printing capacity 1938,IBM test scoring machine The IBM 805 Test Scoring Machine was a machine sold by IBM beginning in 1937. The device scored answer sheets marked with special mark sense pencils.. That machine and its descendants have been in use ever since. 1940 Vaccum tube which processed Information a thousand times faster than its predecessors The 701 contained the arithmetic components, the input and output control circuitry, and the stored program control circuitry.. The arithmetic section contained the memory register, accumulator register and the multiplier-quotient register. 1963 IBM system 360 It took 5 billion dollars to develop, largest commercially finance project in history. System/360 was extremely successful in the market, allowing customers to purchase a smaller system with the knowledge they would always be able to migrate upward if their needs grew, without reprogramming of application software or replacing peripheral devices.

1975 IBM portable computer It was the 5100 model. Introduced in September 1975 with a price of 19975 dollars with only 64K ram, The operating system is Basic/APL. . It offerd the familiar A> prompt character along with features for copying files and disks, comparing files and disks, initializing disks, displaying a directory, renaming files etc.

1983- System 36 , an easy to use business computer featuring 2800 help screens. One of the machine's more interesting optional features was an off-line storage mechanism . 2004 Aim to design fastest computers. Blue gene- Blue Gene is an IBM project aimed at designing supercomputers that can reach operating speeds in the petaflops range, with low power consumption. The project had two main goals: to advance our understanding of the mechanisms behind protein folding via large-scale simulation, and to explore novel ideas in massively parallel machine architecture and software

Comparison between IBM and Microsoft IBM offers limited products, like Symphony, that provide a fraction of the capabilities businesses have come to expect from modern enterprise solutions such as Microsoft Office. Notes users constantly complain of a poor user experience. and IBMs patchwork of disparate platforms and solutions results in an unwelcome rise in cost and complexity.

Oracle Microsoft
More effective choices Microsoft Exchange gives the choice of an on-premises deployment with Exchange Server 2013, a Microsoft-hosted service with Exchange Online, or a seamless mix of both.

IBM
Oracle products dont really work well together. Oracles sales force is extremely aggressive about pushing a suite of products, but has much fewer integration points than SAP. In fact, integration is usually left entirely up to the customer. Oracle is also very reluctant to talk about product roadmaps for fear that future products will cannibalize existing ones. Oracle Optimized Solutions Limited capabilities are fully documented, IBMs lack of coordination on pretested, and tuned customer requirements and end- architectures that take the user experience results in guesswork out of deploying competitively limited products, enterprise software such as Lotus Symphony, that infrastructures enterprise provide a fraction of the solutions can save money, capabilities customers expect reduce integration risks, and from modern enterprise improve user productivity. solutions like Microsoft Office. Oracle Real User Experience It can help identify lost revenue Chaotic user experience IBMs mix of legacy systems, from frustrated users, reduce Patchwork platforms IBMs product strategy is based more on acquisition than on product development. As a result, they offer multiple platforms and solutions that create additional cost and confusion, not to mention the interoperability challenges of integrating on-premises solutions with the IBM cloud.

Greater productivity and anywhere access Microsofts delivery of the best productivity experience across PC, phone, tablet, and browser is made possible by a unified business collaboration platform, along with powerful capabilities delivered in familiar tools.

Richer user experience Microsoft gives users a consistent and integrated

experience across on-premises, cloud, or hybrid deployments, reducing training costs and increasing efficiency.

Lower cost, lower complexity Microsoft provides a single, interoperable, and optimized infrastructure, greater out-ofthe-box functionality with onpremises or in-the-cloud choice, unified .NET extensibility, and an enormous skill pool, which enable overall reduced costs and increased productivity.

software acquisitions, and open-source software creates an inconsistent, chaotic user experience that raises training costs and increases time needed to do job-related tasks. Higher costs and complexity IBMs approach creates considerable complexity and cost. Workers are burdened with inconsistent user experiences and are perplexed by which IBM product to use for a specific need. Application developers are forced to contend with different frameworks and programming models. And administrators are faced with managing unintegrated platform services that lack integration and as well as installing and maintaining overlapping software products. Innovation by acquisition IBMs approach to innovation via acquisition results in disjointed, overlapping, partial solutions with inconsistent user experiences.

support costs by lowering call center volumes, help businesses adapt to changing needs by providing insight into business trends and user preferences. Lower complexity, higher cost than Microsoft. Oracle offers a broad portfolio of software and hardware products and services that enable public, private, and hybrid clouds. Unlike competitors with narrow views of the cloud, Oracle provides the broadest, most complete, and integrated cloud offerings in the industry. Though Microsoft wins on the price front

Substantive innovation and a common architecture Microsoft has consistently demonstrated a commitment to a common architecture and sustained focus on substantive innovation. The foundational technologies in SharePoint 2013, for example, are the result of more than a decade of singular focus on a common underlying architecture, representing billions of dollars in software product research and development.

New innovation solution Oracle has introduced Oracle Innovation Management. This new solution helps organizations increase revenue growth from new products and achieve a competitive advantage by introducing a systematic approach to capturing, selecting and investing in the right ideas and product concepts.

Market server share

Others 27% SQL 47%

IBM 9% Oracle 17%

Diagram for prices.

Conclusion IBM might be lacking in some aspects at the moment but if it can differentiate itself in the marketplace by extending the market reach with more profitable end-to-end solution offerings. The main source of revenue for IBM even today is hardware and the revenue from software based products is very less compared to its competetitors. If it can integarate its hardware and software services it can achive immense success. IBMs infrastructure solutions are built from innovative technology, open standards, and the broadest portfolio of proven storage software and hardware products.

IBM can realize more business value from their information technology by offering Unified storage and security management software Comprehensive disk, tape, and storage networking hardware Integrated business solutions Deep expertise and proven best practices Flexible financing. To get the major part of the market share in the current market IBM will have to deliver on four fundamental capabilities Information Availabilityto deliver continuous and reliable access to information Information Retentionto retain business information in acost effective, efficient, and secure manner Information Complianceto reduce business, legal, and regulatory risks and costs Information Securityto protect and enable secure sharing of information.

The IBM management will have to really THINK about their future plans, repeating the trend started by the founder Thomas J Watson. To get better than their competitos IBM needs to analyse why its rivals like Microsoft and Oracle pose a threat to it . There are numerous reason but there is one simple answer: information. Microsoft has built such a strong community and its members are committed to helping each other. There are so many forums out there you just don't have time to go to them all. And one of the most amazing things I've found is that the MSDN forums are actually sharked by Microsoft's own PSS and dev teams. You just can't get any better than that. You've got both the guys on the support team, and the guys who actually write the code helping you with your problem. They're really giving up all the secrets on how SQL works, and what you can do with it. If you take any 10 DBAs from each side and ask them to look up a solution to a problem on their platform, the SQL guys will find the answer much faster than the Oracle guys or the IBM guys will. And that's just a fact. If you're looking on specifics on how Oracle works internally, it's almost impossible to ferret out the info, but with SQL, there are so many open resources it's just a matter of a few minutes to an answer. So the real difference between these the three is community. Microsoft has gone to great lengths to build a community and really support it. And Oracle is still doing business the old way as is IBM.