IBM Stalking Stimulus Dollars

IBM is making a concerted push to cash in on as many stimulus dollars coming from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act as possible, offering services to health care, energy and other industries liable to garner funding, as well as government agencies administering those funds.

IBM is opening five new offices to provide data analysis that could be used by potential recipients of stimulus funds in areas like education, health care and energy. This move comes less than a month after IBM introduced a new business unit cobbled together from its huge software, services, consulting and research departments to provide customers with in-depth analysis and reports.

IBM said the new centers will service customers doing “financial risk management, smart grids, electronic medical records and food tracking.” One of these centers is to be located in Washington, D.C., where IBM hopes to win contracts with federal, local, and state government officials to help them monitor and report on stimulus spending. IBM said the State of Arkansas is deploying this system to track up to $569.9 million in grants for improving education programs.

Another center located in New York City will attempt to provide customers in the financial services industry with financial risk analysis.

Fred Balboni, head of the new analytics business unit, told me IBM is uniquely positioned to provide meaningful analysis in real time because of this unique combination of skills it can bring to a project, and the IBM Research team in particular; the unit will employ more than 4,000 people. Balboni cited several examples of the kinds of problems that IBM’s business analysis service can resolve, from helping the New York Police Department solve crimes in a matter of hours rather than days, to helping New York State tax collectors identify returns with the highest probability of fraud where the level of fraud is high enough to warrant spending the money to conduct an audit.

“We help clients solve their most difficult problems,” Balboni told me. Later he added, “I’m not certain I have a peer in this market space.”

Boris Evelson, who follows business intelligence at Forrester Research, demurred, noting that the top-tier business intelligence vendors, including Accenture, Deloitte Consulting, PricewaterHouseCoopers (now that it has acquired BearingPoint) and IBM offer very similar services. “Maybe the addition of the research people [into the unit] will make a slight difference, but I don’t think it’s a major differentiator,” he told me.

Other integrated services vendors focused in areas likely to benefit from the stimulus plan include Perot Systems and HP.