Posted on 03/31/2008 8:01:42 PM PDT by revtown
International Business Machines Corp. has been temporarily banned from new business with the federal government and is being investigated by the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Virginia over a contract awarded by the Environmental Protection Agency, the company said Monday.
(Excerpt) Read more at marketwatch.com ...
Are series?
The govt would cut off it's nose to spite it's face? I think not.
That would be like barring General Dynamics from Defense contracts.
IBM IS the government.
EPA employee gave information to IBM employee that may have been used in a bid. This could be a violation of:
Federal law
EPA contract guidance
IBM business conduct policy
“IBM said that the U.S. attorney’s office served “IBM and certain employees with grand-jury subpoenas requesting testimony and documents” related to interaction between EPA and company employees. IBM said it plans to contest the suspension, which can continue for an initial period of up to one year.”
If IBM contests it, maybe the suspension will be held up pending the investigation and by then IBM will settle up and pay a fine.
/mark
IBM is small potatoes these days. Sounds like someone was trying to play catch-up.
That’s okay, maybe they can get another contract in Germany: http://www.news.com/Selling-technology-to-the-Nazis/2010-1071_3-876539.html
That would be huge. Usually some subsidiary of the main company actually bids on the contract to prevent that very thing.
Doesn’t China own IBM????
A Chinese company bought their PC business, is all, IIRC.
Thanx :-p
I don't know why you would say such a thing, unless it's from ignorance...or a different metric than I would use.
The Fed govt, and MOST agencies within the Federal Govt...could not function without IBM's largest computers. The IRS. FDA. SEC. EVERY AGENCY with the government has a BIG, BLUE IBM Mainframe...or dozens of them.
The desktop doesn't matter if you can't process payroll or collect taxes.
Sheesh.
That's what they WANT you to think! :-)
Here in Austin IBM bidded, and won, the contract for the State of Texas to migrate MOST of TX systems/transactions moving to the I-Series (AS/400) in a monstrous migration project from the MVS and other systems.
Turns out IBM *way* underbid the contract to get it, and is underperforming.
I got a bunch of headhunting calls and emails for the migration, and all of them had no real clue what needed to be done.
Glad I didn’t get into the conversion.
You are kidding, right? IBM is freakin huge still in corporate/government land.
That's what's strange about this total suspension. Every contractor company goes through this, every employee knows it's a firing offense, or worse. Normally the company slaps down the offender and keeps doing business, but something happened here to escalate it. Did IBM try to protect the employee?
I can’t say too much about this because I don’t know what is public/private but this has defense implications.
It sounds like the 1 year suspension is in place, but IBM has 1 month to appeal the decision. So if IBM wins the appeal, it might be over in 1 month or less.
Per you comment, there could be defense implications where IBM is a subcontractor to a primary.
Somebody else mentioned the super computer business. The gov’t is a major buyer of those.
That's where all those other PC companies came in ~ to fill the IBM gap ~ and, as the IBM work station marketing people predicted they kicked IBM's A$$.
Sure, there are still big computers around, but IBM doesn't build all of them anymore, and they definitely are invisible on the desk top.
IBM is bigger now than they were 5 years ago. Sure, not as big as in the late 80s/early 90s comparitably but they are still very, very large. In terms of market cap there are I believe one of the top 15 or 20 companies, period.
The question was their ability to dominate the US government's administrative, technical and support operations.
I was there and watched them lose ground, much of it of their own volition. In the early days they were the company of choice when it came to designing computer systems. More recently they've been edged out of that by federal government agency employees and by independent contractors.
No doubt they're still a large company. Think they were worth $162 billion today. Microsoft, much newer to this field, was worth $274 billion. Dell, a major equipment vendor to the US government, was worth $44 billion.
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