IBM
IBM is International Business Machines Corporation, a publicly traded technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York. Its business includes software, consulting and infrastructure. Arvind Krishna is Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer.
Company & leadership
- Founder and origin
- Charles Ranlett Flint organized the merger that formed C-T-R.
- Current leader
- Arvind Krishna — Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer.
- Legal entity
- International Business Machines Corporation; incorporated in New York.
How IBM began
Charles Ranlett Flint brought together the Tabulating Machine Company, International Time Recording Company and Computing Scale Company in 1911. The resulting holding company was called C-T-R. Its businesses supplied equipment for recording time, weighing goods and processing information.
Thomas J. Watson joined in 1914 and became the company's first CEO. He shaped its sales practices and international expansion. The company adopted the IBM name in 1924. This history distinguishes the organizer of the 1911 merger from the leader who later built the IBM business.
Leadership and business direction
IBM's current leadership biography identifies Arvind Krishna as Chairman, President and CEO. His earlier roles included leadership of IBM Research and the Cloud and Cognitive Software business. The biography credits him with directing IBM's acquisition of Red Hat.
IBM describes its present business around software, consulting and infrastructure. Its hybrid cloud and AI activities sit within this wider enterprise technology company. Granite is a model family developed by IBM, rather than a separate company.
Corporate identity and ownership
IBM's 2025 annual filing identifies a New York corporation with principal executive offices in Armonk. Its common stock is publicly listed. IBM is therefore distinct from a privately held AI startup. The filing is the source for the legal entity and headquarters recorded here.
Recent business and research milestones
IBM completed its acquisition of Red Hat on 9 July 2019. The announcement set out a hybrid cloud strategy built around Red Hat's open-source software and IBM's enterprise services. IBM said it would preserve Red Hat's independence and neutrality within the group.
On 25 August 2026, IBM released Granite 4.2 language models with built-in reasoning. This continued a model program that also covers speech, documents, retrieval and forecasting. The model guides below distinguish individual releases and their deployment terms.
Scope of this model catalog
Practical guidance. This catalog covers current Granite 4.2, Switch and specialist releases, selected 4.1 and 4.0 checkpoints, and major earlier models that remain downloadable or listed in watsonx. It does not list every quantization, adapter, research experiment or historical base model.
IBM's hosted catalog lists both pay-as-you-go models and models that require a dedicated deployment. A downloadable checkpoint does not by itself establish a managed IBM endpoint. Hosted access is included below only where the checked IBM catalog lists the model.