"IBM has a much better understanding of health care than other IT vendors we have dealt with," Kourey said. Novant's software provider is Siemens Medical Solutions, and IBM has people on site at Siemens, Kourey said, making interaction smooth for the customer.
"We just have one throat to choke," she quipped, referring to her ability to make one phone call about IT problems and get a single answer from the two vendors.
Siemens vice president Jon Zimmerman, who previously worked for IBM, said Big Blue is its largest health care partner, followed by HP. Worldwide, IBM/Siemens serves 4,000 to 5,000 customers, mostly hospitals. As an example of their successful partnership, he cited Siemens' HDX health care data system, which runs on IBM's WebSphere application server software.
"We developed that together," Zimmerman said. "We showed them the holes they needed to fill for us," such as privacy and security tools to meet federal regulations under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).
Zimmerman said IBM is careful to "stick to its knitting" and let partners such as Siemens focus on actual health care applications. IBM's emphasis is on hardware, platform software, and business and technical consulting.
Software partnership
In the life sciences arena, one of IBM's partners is Accelrys, a software company whose products are aimed at streamlining the lengthy clinical trials that drug makers must undertake to get products approved.
The two jointly market Accelrys' Discovery Studio, which supports the entire drug discovery process by creating a collaborative technology environment that links companies' in-house research with external knowledge such as genomics data.
"We came to IBM in December 2001 and outlined the opportunity in drug discovery," said Steve Levine, Accelyrs' senior director of business development. "We told them, 'you have to make a serious, long-term commitment' to be successful.'" Kovac "got it," he said, and enlisted support within IBM for products such as Discovery Studio, running on eServer systems for Unix, Windows NT and Linux.
Levine said there was a perceived cultural mismatch between IBM's generalised technology structure and the unique, entrepreneurial life sciences industry. But Big Blue overcame much of that scepticism by dedicating its attention and resources to the field with the creation of IBM Life Sciences, he added.
"When they came in, they invested in how to brand themselves and hired people from the industry who could communicate that IBM has a strong culture of innovation," Levine said.
Old habits, however, can die hard. IBM's bureaucratic nature -- nearly 100 years in the making -- can still work against the company at times.
Although he usually works directly with around 10 people at IBM, Levine said "we probably have ad hoc contact with 1,000 IBMers." Inevitably, he added, "some aspects of what we need to do fall into bureaucratic black holes."
For the most part, though, the resources alone of IBM's vast empire far outweigh the drawbacks for many customers. Its sheer size and influence were key reasons the company was able to catch up in life sciences so quickly despite its relatively late start.
With the explosion of information from the human genome and related projects, "the fuse has only been lit" on cooperation between health care and technology, said Eric G. Brown, vice president and health care analyst at Forrester Research. IBM "is a welcome provider because of its ability to do everything from pooling basic research to hosting services in India."
Talkback
IBM will throw their weight around, and make progress.