INDUSTRY

NAPLES, FL -- IBM today bestowed its most prestigious technical honor on five of its top scientists, researchers and developers, naming them IBM Fellows in recognition of their continued innovation and outstanding contributions to the information technology industry. Reflecting the changing nature of the IT business, this year's honorees include the first-ever Fellow from IBM Global Services, in addition to leaders from the company's traditional hardware and software operations. With these new appointments, there are now 55 active IBM Fellows representing the more than 170,000 members of IBM's worldwide technical community. In addition to naming the new Fellows, Samuel J. Palmisano, IBM president and chief executive officer, today presented 21 corporate and patent awards to 83 other scientists, engineers, programmers and IT professionals at the company's annual Corporate Technical Recognition Event. These awards recognize individuals and teams who made technical contributions of superior value to the business, as well as inventors who have made significant contributions to IBM's patent portfolio. "The hallmark of IBM's success through the years has been the tremendous depth and breadth of our technical community," said Nicholas M. Donofrio, IBM's senior vice president, Technology and Manufacturing. "Our ability to innovate and bring new technologies to market quickly differentiates IBM from its competitors. We rely on our technical leaders, including these new IBM Fellows, to provide the vision and direction that ensures we always are anticipating the future needs of the marketplace and prioritizing our R&D efforts around technologies that will transform the industry." Since the IBM Fellows program began in 1963, only 170 individuals have been so honored. Included among the IBM Fellows are five Nobel Laureates and four members of the National Inventors Hall of Fame. The five new Fellows are: Dr. Rakesh R. Agrawal (IBM Almaden Research Center, San Jose, Calif.) is credited with creating the fast-growing, commercially important research field of data mining, which refers to the discovery of useful knowledge hidden in massive amounts of data. His definition of the operations that a data mining system must support and his invention of fast algorithms for pattern discovery provided the impetus and core for the award-winning and strategic IBM Intelligent Miner product. He was the technical leader of the combined Software Group/Research team that brought Intelligent Miner to market in record time in 1996 and helped build a services and consultancy business around it. Since then, Dr. Agrawal has continued to invent more uses for data mining, ranging from searching and integrating catalogs in e-commerce to helping cope with information overload by managing e-mail in Lotus Notes. Michael H. Hartung (Storage Systems Group, Tucson, Ariz.) is IBM's leading expert on storage systems architecture and development. His leadership in developing and delivering the first direct access storage devices in the 1980s revolutionized the storage industry. He is a prolific inventor, responsible for innovations such as concurrent copy, dynamic memory allocation, record-level caching and cross-platform sharing of UNIX and S/390 data, all of which have helped transform how data is stored and used. In 1995, he led the team that defined a road map for IBM's multi-platform storage server strategy. He then helped translate the road map architecture into the design of IBM's flagship enterprise storage solution -- the TotalStorage Enterprise Storage Server (code named "Shark"). Besides continuing to expand the boundaries for high-end storage, Mr. Hartung is currently working to synergize IBM's disk/tape portfolio to deliver greater value to customers. James A. Kahle (Technology Group, Austin, Texas) has been a leader in defining, designing and delivering IBM's leading-edge, high-performance Reduced Instruction Set Computing (RISC) microprocessors. Starting as a key designer for the RIOS I processor that launched IBM into the fast-growing marketplace for UNIX workstations and servers, he has continued to lead the definition of IBM's PowerPC architecture employing superscalar, multiscalar and simultaneous multi-threading technologies. His latest and perhaps most significant recent achievement is the GigaProcessor for IBM's eServer p690, also known as "Regatta," which delivers twice the performance of its nearest competitor at half the cost. The GigaProcessor was the industry's first 64-bit microprocessor to cross the one-gigahertz barrier. Currently, Mr. Kahle is chief architect and technical leader for a joint effort between Sony, Toshiba and IBM that is developing a radically new microprocessor chip called "Cell" for the next generation of consumer electronics products. Maurice J. Perks (IBM Global Services, Basingstoke, UK) is acknowledged as a world expert on the architecture, design and implementation of the most complex IT systems. He is constantly sought out by some of IBM's most prestigious customers, including banks, insurance companies and government departments, to work with them on highly visible activities. Within IBM, Mr. Perks is equally well-regarded for consistently transforming lessons learned from customer engagements into broadly useful new approaches to complex system challenges. Thousands of projects worldwide have taken advantage of his End-to-End (E2E) Design Method -- the first reusable process for designing complex system infrastructures, which evolved into the Global Services Method and Enterprise Storage Server Reference Architectures used today. Mr. Perks is the first "career" Global Services employee to be appointed an IBM Fellow. Dr. Anthony A. Storey (IBM Software Group, Hursley, UK) is a widely recognized expert in the field of online transaction processing and the vital infrastructure technology of middleware. Time and again, his initiatives have been central to the success of IBM's software business. He led every critical activity in the evolution of CICS, on which IBM customers depend to manage more than 30 billion transactions per day. He conceived the family of messaging products now known as WebSphere MQ that guarantee secure, reliable transactions. He was a prime mover in creating the Enterprise Java Beans industry specification that brought Java into the server environment and formed the foundation for WebSphere, IBM's premier software platform for e-business. More recently, Dr. Storey has turned his attention to keeping IBM at the infrastructure forefront in the emerging areas of Web services and grid computing. About the IBM Fellows Program The IBM Fellows program was founded in 1962 by Thomas J. Watson, Jr., as a way to promote creativity among the company's "most exceptional" technical professionals. The first appointments were made in 1963. Requirements are stringent and only the most significant technical achievements are recognized. In addition to a history of accomplishments, candidates must show strong potential to make continued contributions to the business and to the industry. IBM Fellows are given broad latitude to identify and pursue projects in their area of expertise to advance IBM's technological leadership.