IBM
In 1911, Big Blue began with the merger of three disparate-seeming businesses to become the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company. Fast forward a century later, the company celebrated its 100th anniversary with record annual profit of $15.9 billion, a 7% year-over-year increase.
Much of that came from healthy revenue growth in BRIC countries -- Brazil, Russia, India, and China -- business analytics, cloud services, and Smarter Planet, IBM's savvy ongoing campaign to solve real-world problems, from traffic congestion to water management.
