Sam Palmisano has the easy, boyish grin and hearty laugh of the consummate salesman he has been for much of his 30-year career at IBM. He can seem quite a contrast to his predecessor as CEO, Lou Gerstner, a notoriously gruff, prickly outsider responsible for one of the greatest turnarounds in corporate history. But nearly a year after taking over the reins amid a lingering slump in corporate spending on technology, Palmisano, 51, has shown that he has sharp teeth behind that smile.
He has accelerated Big Blue's transformation from a hardware dinosaur to a technology-services dynamo--a firm that, rather...