An IBMer since the early ’80s, CEO Virginia “Ginni†Rometty assumed the top job in 2012 and has since made a series of sweeping changes. She snapped up cloud-services provider SoftLayer Technologies for $2 billion last year and has pledged to invest $1 billion toward the development and commercialization of Watson, a so-called cognitive-computing system capable of sifting through millions of scientific papers in seconds. She has also sold off some of IBM’s lower-margin businesses, made cuts in its still-massive employee base, and even simplified contracts for clients (bringing down the typical number of pages from 30 to just four).
More recently she has brought the dowdy centenarian IT company into head-turning relationships with some hot California celebrities. Witness its unprecedented alliance with its old rival Apple, announced in July, which will bring IBM services to the iPhone maker’s iOS platform.
Read more at Fortune.
