Following is knowledge gained by CIS 301 students from IBM Day, February 27, 2008.

1. IBM Jobs and Internships
Shelley Smith the presenter decided on an informal presentation for the 5:00pm session. She told the group a little bit about her background. She graduated from JMU and has been with IBM for 13 years, in which she has moved around to different jobs within the company. Currently she is a Practice Operations Manager for the Public Sector. The interns she was looking for were those who are majoring in CIS, CS, or ISAT.

The young man I spoke to was a recent graduate of JMU. He had come from the ISAT major but knew they also hired from the CIS majors too. He told me that he works with web development and is enjoying it so far.
When I talked to Peter who was a JMU graduate from ISAT, he mentioned that IBM have a lot of training exercise and PowerPoint slide that could help student to get more of a background knowledge about What kind of job they do. As he mentioned IBM have a variety of different field which put there worker based there knowledge of that field.

IBM's internship program usually lasts for 8-9 weeks and is usually located in the Washington, DC area. The jobs of the interns can range widely depending on what technical skills the interns have as well as what type of job field the interns are interested in (programming, sales, network administration, etc). Internships at IBM are designed provide valuable, real-world experience that accelerates preparation for a professional career.

IBM offers an interesting compensation package to their employees. While all the standard things are there, the thing that stood out to me, and was mentioned by the person I talked to, was the 100% tuition reimbursement offered for accreditation.

I was able to speak to one of the presenters after the show and he was telling me about the IBM Extreme Internship Experience. Here's the basics of it: You form small project group and are given different tasks that are actually legitimate projects (not filing paper work and making coffee runs.) He said its very competitive but in the past, most members of these project teams are offered jobs because of how well they do.

I was able to get help on my resume from Shelley. Within my resume I had courses listed as "CIS 301: Information Technology Tools & Methods." She told me that listing relevant course was good but terms like "CIS 301" don't mean much to employer's and that I should make the listing more descriptive. This should include the knowledge obtained from the class. The ending outcome should be something like "Information Technology Tools: Linux (CentOS)"

Interviews with IBM typically last 90 minutes and are composed of three, thirty minute interviews - each with a different person. In my case, two of the interviews were with recent JMU Alum who were currently working with clients in the public sector and one Alum who was working as a manager for 1500 employees. After the completion of the interview, candidates are required to complete two online applications as well as an aptitude test.

The presenter for the informal presentation at 5:00pm was Shelly Smith. She talked briefly about IBM mentioning how they have 370,000 employees worldwide in over 100 countries. When asked about transitioning from IBM's private to public sector Miss Smith said IBM made the transition smooth and relatively easy.

At the 5:00 o'clock presentation the presenters talk a lot more about the actual job part about IBM. The presenter I talked to talked about how he had a agent of sorts that work for IBM and search for certain projects that he was suited for.
2. IBM Software Overview

3. SOA (Service Oriented Architecture)
SOA stands for Service Oriented Architecture. SOA enables a business to become more flexible, reduce costs, and gives the business investment protection. SOA addresses the problem that, complex application infrastructure is expensive to maintain and difficult to adapt to. SOA also allows for a business to consolidate multiple sources.

IBM has a student and faculty portal that is similar to what JMU has with Microsoft, the MSDN Alliance. Users are allowed to downloaded IBM products such as functionality tester, performance tester and the AIS application. The rational functional tester can work with multiple applications and it is based off Eclipse IDE. It reduce time on regression testing.

4. IBM in the Public Sector

IBM Operates under 5 public sector industries: Healthcare, Education, State and Local, Federal Defense, and Federal HLS + Civ. AIS, Application Innovation Services, is an area of practice within these public sector industries. AIS is concerned with the use of technology and the consulting needed in order to properly utilize technology.

IBM's revenue breakdown: 70% comes from software, services
remaining 30% comes from hardware

AIS (Application Innovation Services) is divided into four main career sections:
1) operation and maintenance:located at the bottom of the pyramid
Includes jobs in: infrastructures/data centers, applications,
solutions, communication/collaboration, help desks, and integrated technical solutions
2) building and integration: located above operation and maintenance
Includes jobs in: mission and technical solutions, custom
applications, portals, middleware services, data, infrastructures, and ITs
3) design: located above building and integration
Includes jobs in: architecture, systems engineering, networks, and security
4) management: located at the top of the pyramid
Includes jobs in: program management

Within each of these sectors, employees may work in a wide range of industries. The presenter, Shelley Smith stressed that while IBM is the one of the largest companies in the world, the focus on project groups allows it to have a much smaller and close-knit feel. All present agreed that it is an excellent place to launch a career as the training combined with the level of trust and personal responsibility enables new hires to discover their potential early on. Things to look forward to in the upcoming years: automated US Census.


IBM is the world's largest consulting organization and is ranked #1 service provider in consulting and systems integration. IBM has staff is in more than 160 countries and its client list includes 90% of the communications, retail, and electronic companies in the Fortune 500.

One of the organizations that uses IBM is the U.S. Census Bureau. The U.S Census Bureau receives 19 million visitors a year and 1.5 billion hits a year. That is approximately 4,000 a day!!! not so much compared to Google and stuff but still. This amount requires 98% uptime nonetheless.


5. Free IBM Services and Software

The Rational Functional Tester, which sounds way too much like that thing from Dude Where's My Car? provides a number of services that IBM employees develop, use themselves, and distribute. The RFT provides testers with automated capabilities for data driven testing, performs full functional testing, can test multiple applications such as Java and HTML simultaneously, and allows users to create and edit object oriented test scripts. It is used primarily for Regression testing, which means it tests to see if any new changes have been made since the most recently distributed packages were released. I don't know what any of this means.

6. Second Life and IBM

There was a presentation about IBM and Second Life software technology. Second Life (SL) is an Internet-based virtual world launched in 2003, developed by Linden Research, Inc (Linden Lab). The Second Life Viewer enables its users, called "Residents", to interact with each other through motional avatars, providing an advanced level of a social network service combined with general aspects of a metaverse. Residents can explore, meet other Residents, socialize, participate in individual and group activities, create and trade items (virtual property) and services from one another. The goal of Linden Lab is to create a metaverse world in which people can interact, play, do business, and otherwise communicate. IBM uses it to host virtual conferences.

7. IBM Competition

IBM's main competitors are EDI, Hewlett-Packard, and Microsoft. As of fiscal year-end 2006, IBM had exactly 355,766 employees worldwide and grossed sales of $91,424.0 (million) ranking it #15 in Fortune 500 and #31 in FT Global 500.

IBM hosted a bridge-building competition at 3:30. Andrew Mills and Travis Heeter represented CIS, but came in a disappointing 3rd place. The bridges were constructed using gum drops and uncooked spaghetti noodles. The categories of competition were height or length. The COB team competed in length.

8. IBM Background
IBM's first section was with Shelley Smith, the main recruitor for her sector of roughly 1500 employees. IBM has changed from a large hardware manufacturer to the worlds 7th largest corporation started as a hardware manufacturer but now 70% of its profits comes from services. The company has expanded worldwide and has approximately 300000 employees. Shelley Smith explained the importance of a large corporation to make thier employees feel as though they worked for a small, tight company even though the job flexibilty and variation and career advancement has that one one of the worlds largest corporations.