IBM’s Surpasses Competitors With Fastest Worldwide Revenue Growth

ARMONK, NY -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced today that it has achieved the fastest worldwide revenue growth of the top five vendors in external controller-based (ECB) disk storage (commonly referred to as RAID storage) in both the fourth quarter of 2006 as well as year-over-year, according to Gartner, Inc (http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=501993). This strong growth enabled IBM to pass its closest competitor.

IBM again demonstrated outstanding results in ECB revenue growth in 4Q06, increasing 17%, the highest growth of the top five vendors. IBM’s overall ECB revenue increased 13.2 percent for the full year in 2006, substantially faster than the overall segment, which grew 4.1 percent year-over-year.

“We believe IBM’s industry-leading growth in storage is a result of our expanding product portfolio and delivery of solutions that help our clients manage their growing storage needs,” said Andy Monshaw, general manager, IBM System Storage.

In 2006, IBM introduced new industry-leading storage products across its portfolio, including expanded storage virtualization offerings, the industry’s first tape drive with native encryption, and the groundbreaking Turbo models for the IBM System Storage DS8000 series. IBM also rolled out many new products as a result of its strong relationship with Network Appliance (NetApp).

About IBM

For more information about IBM and IBM storage, visit http://www.ibm.com/storage

###