We analyse IBM and Oracle, their various innovation policies and their different acquisitions during the first half of 2018.
IBM is a global technology and innovation company headquartered in New York. It is the world's largest technology and consulting employer, with more than 400,000 employees serving customers in 170 countries. Also, they devote 20% of services to hardware manufacturing and 80% to consulting in the fields of IT and technology.
IBM offers a wide range of technology and consulting services; a broad portfolio of middleware for collaboration, predictive analytics, software development and systems management; and the world's most advanced servers and supercomputers. Using its expertise in business consulting, technology and R&D, IBM helps clients become "smarter" as the planet becomes digitally interconnected.
The US giant's consulting programmes share a common characteristic of being smart and revived IBM's innovation strategy and creativity in a world that demands an equitable balance of social, economic and environmental concerns.
Strategic innovation at IBM can be reflected in the number of patents it holds. IBM invests more than $6,000M a year in R&D, and has just completed its 21st year of patent leadership. The company's active portfolio contains around 26,000 US patents and around 40,000 worldwide as a result of its investments.
Part of the strategic innovation at IBM is the established corporate policy on environmental protection, whereby they have significantly reduced hazardous waste from their production. And finally, IBM has chosen to reduce its employment in the US and Europe in order to increase it in the emerging markets of India, China and the Philippines.
On the other hand, OracleOracle, an integrated cloud applications and platform services firm that offers complete SaaS application suites for ERP, HCM and CX, is a US company that is changing IT complexity, taking it out of the enterprise by engineering hardware and software to work together, in the cloud and in the data centre. By eliminating complexity and simplifying IT, Oracle enables its customers - 400,000 of them in more than 145 countries around the world - to accelerate innovation and create added value for their customers.
By designing out the complexity that stifles business innovation, Oracle is designing in speed, reliability, security and manageability. The result is best-in-class products across an integrated stack of hardware and software, with each layer designed and engineered to work together according to open industry standards. Oracle's comprehensive, open and integrated solutions deliver extreme performance at the lowest cost, all from a single vendor. Integrated, industry-specific solutions are designed to address complex business processes across a wide range of industries.
IBM has in the last year invested in companies, but has also acquired some companies:
Similarly, Oracle made both investments and acquisitions during the year. As for the companies acquired: