IBM Named in Analyst Firm's Leaders Quadrant for Business Intelligence Services

Market Wire, March, 2007

IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that Gartner has positioned IBM in the Leaders Quadrant in its report, "Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Services, North America, 2007." According to Gartner, "the Leaders provide offerings that meet demand, as well as demonstrate the vision necessary to sustain their position as requirements evolve in the Business Intelligence (BI) market." The report also states, "BI and performance management have significant impact across an enterprise. Organizations seek to achieve business value from the analysis of their information through the use of IT... Gartner forecasts the market for BI-related services to grow at a five-year compounded annual rate of 5.8 percent worldwide and reach more than $20 billion by 2010."

According to the IBM Global Innovation Outlook, the amount of digital information is expected to double every 11 hours by 2010. The most successful corporations will be those who master structured and unstructured information flow throughout their organization thus improving decision making and overall business performance. IBM's Global BI Practice is committed to helping businesses gain more value from these information assets. As the complexity of managing these information architectures increases, organizations are facing new challenges that require new approaches and technologies.

IBM Global Business Services' BI practice provides the industry's broadest and deepest BI services, by providing the right balance and combination of industry, functional/operational, technical and change management skills to deliver comprehensive, value-added BI solutions. This combination provides a basis for integrated, business-driven solutions with demonstrable business return throughout the enterprise.

"We believe Gartner's latest research shows IBM's strategy to deliver comprehensive BI Services that address our clients' most important and complex information-related requirements is working," said Mike Schroeck, Global Business Intelligence Practice leader, IBM Global Business Services. "At the same time we are increasing our BI focus and investments in areas such as: SOA, business process management, analytics, content management, governance, real-time access, and our industry solutions in order to continue to deliver the market's leading BI solutions to our clients."

The Business Intelligence practice is a core component of IBM's Information on Demand initiative. This initiative combines IBM services, products and research to develop integrated solutions aimed at helping clients better compete and pursue new business opportunities by using information as a strategic weapon. Demand for IBM's Information on Demand offerings has grown rapidly during the past 12 months with hundreds of new customer wins and 42 percent revenue growth in the fourth quarter of 2006.

For more information on IBM, visit www.ibm.com .

About Gartner Magic Quadrant

The Magic Quadrant is copyrighted March 2007 by Gartner, Inc. and is reused with permission. The Magic Quadrant is a graphical representation of a marketplace at and for a specific time period. It depicts Gartner's analysis of how certain vendors measure against criteria for that marketplace, as defined by Gartner. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in the Magic Quadrant, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors placed in the "Leaders" quadrant. The Magic Quadrant is intended solely as a research tool, and is not meant to be a specific guide to action. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

(1.) Gartner, Inc., "Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Services," by Alex Soejarto and Bill Hostmann, March 13, 2007.

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Contact: Takako Yamakura IBM (914) 766-4637 yamakura@us.ibm.com