IBM today elevated five employees to the title of IBM Fellow -- its most prestigious technical honor. The company also presented more than $2.8 million in cash awards to employees whose technical innovation have yielded exceptional value to the company and its customers.

IBM conferred the accolades and awards at its 2003 Corporate Technical Recognition Event (CTRE) in Scottsdale, Ariz. CTRE is a 40-year tradition at IBM, established to recognize exceptional technical employees and reward them for extraordinary achievements and contributions to the company's technology leadership.

"Our technical employees are among the best and brightest innovators in the world. They share a passion for excellence that defines their work and permeates the products and services IBM delivers to its customers," said Nick Donofrio, senior vice president, technology and manufacturing for IBM. "CTRE provides the means for us to honor those who have distinguished themselves as exceptional leaders among their peers."

Among the special honorees at the 2003 CTRE are five employees who earned the coveted distinction of IBM Fellow:


- Grady Booch, chief scientist of Rational Software, IBM Software Group. Recognized internationally for his innovative work on software architecture, modeling, and software engineering process. Mr. Booch is one of the original authors of the Unified Modeling Language (UML), the industry-standard language of blueprints for software-intensive systems.

- Dr. Donald Chamberlin, researcher, IBM Almaden Research Center. An expert in relational database languages, Dr. Chamberlin is co- inventor of SQL, the language that energized the relational database market. He has also influenced the creation of XQuery, one of a new generation of database query languages covering structured, semi-structured and unstructured data.

- Dr. George Galambos, chief technology officer, IBM Global Services (IGS) in Canada; the first Fellow from Canada. Dr. Galambos specializes in high-performance, high availability designs, operational effectiveness, and risk assessment/mitigation, focusing on systems engineering and architecture reuse that enhances efficiency and stability. He is a principal driver of and contributor to the widely acclaimed "Patterns for e-business" and the Enterprise Solution Structure Reference Architectures, widely used by IGS in customer engagements.

- Rod Smith, vice president of Internet emerging technologies, IBM Software Group. A leader in the areas of object-oriented programming, visual development tools, Java, XML, and Web Services. Rod also was the chief technical strategist for focusing the Java platform for use in middleware solutions, in particular initiating contributions to the development of the J2EE.

- Charles Webb, eServer processor design, IBM Systems Group. Charles Webb has led the reinvention of IBM's eServer zSeries microprocessor designs and roadmap, including the z900 server, where he provided the bridge among architecture, hardware, compilers and system software, defining major portions of the 64- bit architecture and beyond.


The title of IBM Fellow is the company's most preeminent technical distinction and is granted in recognition of outstanding and sustained technical achievements in engineering, programming, science and technology. Only 175 individuals have earned this designation in the company's history and, including the newly named Fellows, 56 are active employees. IBM Fellows are encouraged to further enhance their potential for creative achievements and typically work on special projects or research initiatives that lead the company in exciting new directions.

