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SEPTEMBER 2004

Top MBAs & Computer Science Majors Win at IBM
by Dorothy Davis

To feel buoyantly optimistic about the future of our country, about Yankee ingenuity and creative U. S. industry, and the outstanding students our schools are producing-uplifting things like that-you can't do better these days than to take a peek at IBM! Yes, that stodgy old company of our youth (well, mine anyway) has been busy reinventing itself. We took a new look at them at a recent press conference, which they had called to introduce us to the doings of the 20 North American standouts of their 6th Annual Extreme Blue intern program.

The students, top MBA candidates and Computer Science majors, 200 of them in all worldwide, were chosen from a competitive field of 4,500 high caliber entrants. "The winners are the Michael Jordans, the Tiger Woods, the best of the best!" said Jane Harper, Director of IBM's Talent Programs. "IBM," she said, "began their competitive program in 1999 when heavy duty talent wars were going on, during the highly competitive dot com era. Top graduates wanted to work for the start-up companies, rather than for IBM. We had to do something!"

What they did was come up with "Extreme Blue," an innovative, highly competitive intern program combining projects, people, places and a Wow! experience. The projects are important ones, requested by IBM employees, needed solutions that will change the world. The people are some of the brightest people from universities, and top people from IBM. The places are intellectually stimulating cities, and labs that are absolutely state of the art, so the winning students can walk in the door and start working immediately. The Wow! comes from being able to spend time going rock climbing, sky diving, or enjoying other exciting activities.

Here are some of this year's extraordinary results from the five North American labs.  Some of them were developed over only one summer.

1. IBM Almaden Lab: Business Activity Monitoring (BAM)-A Solution for Financial Services

Say you're a banker about to approve a big loan. How do you figure out the risk and therefore the interest? In the past you could only get static week-old information about the loans your institution had made. But what if three minutes ago, unbeknownst to you, a huge loan had been granted in the same high-risk field? You'd be on the brink of overextending your company and charging too little interest. With BAM you can check your computer and find out about any of your company's transactions three minutes after they're made in enough detail to monitor your risk level in all areas.

2. IBM Cambridge Lab: BizMatch-Helping IBM Sales Professionals Better Leverage Its 90,000 Business Partners (BP)

A Match.com for IBM's BPs. In quick response to a series of simple questions and answers up pops a short list of companies who can provide exactly what another client company needs-a market, product, service, whatever. An instantaneous connection between companies that benefits them both.

3. IBM Toronto Lab: Symbiosis-New Testing Tool for Problem Determination

A downed company Website can be up and running again in record time. With Symbiosis they can just turn to their computers, which are fed diagnostic information from the Website, to speedily analyze the problem and repair it.#

For further information about IBM's Extreme Blue and their other innovative programs see www.ibm.com/extremeblue.

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