IBM Annual Report

Not generally known as a light-hearted read, annual reports for a massive multinational technology companies are usually packed with numbers and can be downright daunting. With the unending amounts of data available in today’s world and with International Business Machine’s (IBM) ongoing attempts to harness and utilize that data, IBM’s 2016 Annual Report was no exception.

Some noteworthy data-related numbers featured in the publication:

• IBM Watson intends to churn through 2,300 exabytes (that’s 2,300 quintillion bytes) of healthcare data by 2020, including medical records, images and research, with the aim of aiding doctors and producing better outcomes for patients.
• The Weather Company, acquired by IBM in 2015, was handling 45 billion weather inquiries and analyzing data from 3 billion reference points each day by the end of 2016.
• Ross Intelligence, a third-party legal company, uses IBM Watson to power its tool that can read in one million legal documents per second and quickly find relevant sections for a particular case.
• H&R Block started using IBM Watson’s cognitive learning abilities to analyze the 74,000 page-long tax code and it’s constant changes in an effort to aid tax preparers in finding every possible deduction for it’s customers.

As part of the creative team tasked with developing and producing the 2016 IBM Annual report, Michael Dudley was responsible for creating the final mechanical file that was the culmination of an amazing team of writers, designers, and number-crunchers. The first 24 pages of this publication set out to visually represent these huge strides IBM had made in 2016 on their path of ongoing transformation and return to growth, and highlighted many of the amazing feats IBM accomplished that year.