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IBM

“Innovation is what brought IBM to the region and it’s what keeps us here today.”

Bob Greenberg
IBM

In 1965, IBM announced that it would locate a major new manufacturing plant in a tract of land set aside as The Research Triangle Park. There, it manufactured components for the IBM System 360, the first modular mainframe computer that launched the computer revolution and, ultimately, the Information Age.

More than 40 years later, IBM remains one of the Research Triangle Region’s great success stories – a major multinational corporation nimble enough to transform itself again and again to lead the market it helped create.

“Innovation is what brought IBM to the region and it’s what keeps us here today,” says Bob Greenburg, IBM's senior state executive for North Carolina. “We come to work every day with only one goal in mind: providing new and improved products, services and processes for our clients in around the world. It’s what we do for a living.”

IBM trades in the Research Triangle Region’s leading commodities: technology and business expertise. It helps anchor the region’s world-leading pervasive computing cluster, a dense of network of technology companies, vendors, service providers and support organizations that work together to enable on-demand access to information from anywhere at any time, changing the way information is gathered, stored and shared.

IBM benefits from the region's favorable economic climate and from productive relationships between businesses and government here. The region’s high quality of life, affordable housing supply and abundant recreational opportunities help IBM attract top talent. Its close ties and collaboration with the region’s research universities promote innovation and mutual benefit. Dr. Dave Bradley, for instance, part of the small group of IBM engineers who developed the IBM Personal Computer and inventor of the control+alt+delete PC command, joined N.C. State’s engineering faculty after retiring from the company.

"We sell business solutions,” Greenberg says. “We help companies understand how they may need to reinvent their own company as we have reinvented ours. Innovation is mystifying to some, but it’s what we do.”