"Sam" Palmisano (born July 29, 1951)[1] is a former president and the eighth chief executive officer of IBM until January 2012.
[11] As an offensive lineman at Calvert Hall College High School in Baltimore, Maryland he prepared earnestly, studying pregame scouting reports and seldom missed a blocking assignment.
[12] He holds a bachelor's degree in history from Johns Hopkins University where he was member of Beta Theta Pi.
He also played football (center, offensive tackle, team co-captain) there, and turned down an opportunity to try out with the Oakland Raiders.
[8] Palmisano was promoted to CEO in March 2002 and named chairman effective January 1, 2003, succeeding the retiring Louis V. Gerstner, Jr. after the Dot-com bubble bust.
This included purchasing PricewaterhouseCoopers Consulting in 2002 so that IBM could go beyond selling computers and software and help customers use technology to solve business challenges (marketing, procurement, and manufacturing).
[5] [6] In 2008, despite the financial crisis and economic recession [7], he launched I.B.M.’s Smarter Planet initiative which applies computer intelligence to create more efficient systems for numerous applications including utility grids and traffic management.
[8] Although the services and consulting businesses, which then-CEO Gerstner had championed, provided most of IBM's revenue, software analytics had higher margins, contributed more profits and had more growth.
products in corporate accounts, and its purchasing power helped lower the cost of components for larger IBM offerings like mainframes and servers.
In 2021, he was voted off the board after an ESG - based shareholder revolt led by activist hedge fund Engine 1.
[17] In 2010 Palmisano was awarded The Deming Cup, an excellence award presented by the W. Edwards Deming Center for Quality, Productivity, and Competitiveness at Columbia Business School, for his ability to drive IBM to new levels of operational excellence and for his role in creating and leading IBM's Global Services business unit.