IBM

International Business Machines Corporation ("IBM," nicknamed "Big Blue") is a publicly traded US technology company (NYSE: IBM) headquartered in Armonk, New York. It was founded on June 16, 1911, as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company and renamed IBM in 1924. It is one of the largest IT companies in the world, operating in more than 170 countries, with roughly 264,000–286,000 employees and reported revenue of about $67.5 billion for FY2025. It is a standalone public company, not a subsidiary.

Operations. IBM reports four segments: Software (~45% of revenue), Consulting (~31%), Infrastructure (~23%), and Financing (~1%). Specific offerings include the Red Hat hybrid-cloud platform, the watsonx data and AI product line, transaction-processing software for mainframes, the IBM Z mainframe family, storage and power systems, and global IT consulting and managed services.

Litigation posture — operating company, not an NPE. IBM appears in the tracked data once, as plaintiff, with no defendant cases. That single plaintiff-side entry is not an infringement suit: it is a petition IBM filed at the USPTO Patent Trial and Appeal Board, a defensive validity challenge typical of a large operating company attacking patents asserted against itself or its customers. IBM's portfolio is primarily prosecution- and cross-licensing-oriented rather than assertion-driven, so the 1/0 plaintiff–defendant split reflects a defensive challenger, not a patent monetization entity.

Notable case and context. The tracked case, IBM v. Intellectual Ventures II LLC (PTAB, filed April 2014), is part of a broader series of IBM inter partes review petitions against Intellectual Ventures II patents — including U.S. Patents 6,314,409; 5,745,574; 6,826,694; 6,715,084; and 7,634,666 — which IV was asserting against banking customers such as SunTrust, JPMorgan Chase, and Commerce Bancshares in district court. IBM's challenges were filed in an indemnitor role for banking clients. Outcomes varied: institution was granted in several (e.g., IPR2014-00587, decided September 2015) and denied in others (IPR2014-00672 and IPR2014-00681), and IPR2014-01465 was later terminated on estoppel grounds. Filings sit at the PTAB, not in plaintiff-friendly district venues.