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1. IBM brought in $95.8 billion in revenue in 2009
2. The company employs a staggering 399,409 people worldwide.
3. It has 546,247 shareholders of record.
4. The company's scientists, engineers, consultants, and sales professionals work at offices in over 200 countries.
5. IBM will celebrate 100 years in business in 2011 in honor of the formation of the core predecessor companies that would become International Business Machines under one combined umbrella in 1911.
6. The company was initially called the Computing Tabulating Recording Corporation—it didn't officially change its name to IBM until 1924, but had certain business units operating as IBM before them.
7. One of the first big data processing product milestones came in 1921 with the advent of the IBM 1 Printing tabulator, the first fully automatic card-controlled machine produced by the company.
8. In 1956 the company released the landmark IBM 205 Random Access Memory Account Machine (RAMAC), which made in-line data processing possible and was built around a magnetic disk memory unit.
9. In 1981, IBM started the PC revolution with the introduction of the IBM 5150, a compact personal computer that smoked mainframe processing and came at a price tag of under $1,600.
10. For 17 years in a row, IBM has received more U.S. patents than any other company.
11. The company invests $6 billion a year on research.
12. IBM Employee Awards Count 5 Nobel Prizes 4 Turing Awards 9 National Medals of Technology 5 National Medals of Science
13. Just about 25 percent of the 20 fastest supercomputers in the world are built on IBM's Blue Gene solutions, powering research in nuclear power, climate modeling, human genome mapping, and astronomy and brain studies.
14. Think Microsoft's antitrust suits were bad? IBM went through a brutal battle with the U.S. Department of Justice back in the 1960s and 1970s that lasted nearly 13 years and accumulated 2,500 depositions and 55 million pages of documents-the longest antitrust trial in history.
15. IBM's legal team exhausted the DOJ-the trial ended in a stalemate with no pay-outs from either side and the feds absolving the company of any wrongdoing.
16. Before the IT environmental movement was green, it started Blue. IBM first issued its corporate policy on environmental affairs way back in 1971.
17. Have a bold entrepreneurial idea that you think could change the playing field in technology? IBM might be able to help you fund it. In September it held a networking and marketing competition called SmartCamp that pitted entrepreneurs' ideas against one another in a fight for attention from VCs, academics, business leaders and the media.
18. Since 2000 the company has made more than 120 strategic acquisitions to increase its technological and business capabilities.
19. IBM announced this month that it would be opening a cloud computing lab in the UK specifically geared for channel partners around the world to advance their technical knowledge of the cloud and improve their marketing and sales pitches around the cloud.
20. Since Oracle bought Sun for keeps, IBM has made a concerted effort to woo away Sun's former channel partners starting during the M&A transition period.
21. After complaints from channel partners over the difficulty in progressing through IBM's ranked channel system, the company made some late October changes to its program.
22. In the old program, only 3 percent of partners were able to progress to Premier level of the PartnerWorld incentive program.
23. The new program simplifies requirements for advancement and institutes a new weighted points system to allow partners to earn credit based on certifications, skills acquired and control of IBM software, hardware and services.
24. With more than 10,000 IBM channel partners selling into the midmarket, the company is relying on VARS, solution providers and consultants to help it gain a firmer grip on the market, which it estimates will buy $156 billion in IT in 2010.
25. Over the past year, IBM has spent in the range of $130 million in marketing to support this mid-market channel push
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