Competition is intense among students for a summer place on IBM's unique Extreme Blue programme, writes John Collins
Ambitious students are always seeking summer work experience with the leading companies in their sector. But for the last couple of years IBM's Irish operation has had an extra edge in attracting students to the company - the Extreme Blue programme.
It's a unique programme which provides mentoring and resources to enable students around the world to tackle real- life projects on behalf of IBM.
Typically, the teams are made up of three technical and one business student. Most likely the students will never have met before they come together for a 12-week summer holiday immersion in IBM - they are usually from different universities and may even be from different countries.
According to Margaret Ashida, director of Global University Talent Programs for IBM, the thinking behind it is that innovation is much more likely to occur when you bring technology together with business insight, rather than letting technologists experiment with the tools in isolation.
Each team is assigned to a particular IBM business unit in their local country and, in turn, the business unit appoints both a business and technical mentor who commit to meeting with the team at least once a week.
"In a lot of cases we've literally had to throw them out of the labs and tell them to get back to their day jobs," laughs Ashida.
Given that Big Blue, as IBM is nicknamed in the technology business, has an image as a large conservative company, Extreme Blue no doubt helps in combating the attraction of Google and other upstarts to the next crop of graduates. The ploy certainly seems to be working - IBM receives thousands of applications for a few hundred places worldwide each summer. Less than 5 per cent of summer interns who work at IBM are placed on Extreme Blue.
Each year in Europe, at the end of the programme, the students come together at an expo where they present their work to IBM executives. Last week, the 2005 expo took place at IBM's Software Lab in north county Dublin where an Irish team was among the five nations presenting.
The members of Extreme Blue Ireland were Fintan Fairmichael, a native of Belfast who has just completed a degree in computer science at UCD, Michael Crawford from Warrenpoint in Co Down who studied computing science at the University of Ulster, Kevin O'Riordan from Cork who studied computer science in UCC, and Stephen Tapley from Lucan, Co Dublin who has just finished a degree in mechatronic engineering at DCU and was business lead on the team.
Their project was entitled Value, an acronym for Visual Awareness of the Location of Uses in E-meetings. Electronic meetings are increasingly used by companies such as IBM to facilitate communication between geographically- dispersed teams. They use web-based conferencing technologies that combine instant messaging and the telephone to provide a virtual meeting space.
Using existing IBM technologies, the team equipped a conference meeting room so that all attendants would be automatically logged in using Radio Frequency ID (RFID) technology that senses when a user enters the conference room. To illustrate the point, all attendees at the Expo - which this year included members of academia as well as IBM staff - were issued with badges which contained tiny RFID tags. The sensors the team developed were then placed at the entrance of the Hamilton Auditorium and could display who was in attendance.
The VALUE project was sponsored by IBM's Dublin Software Lab, which predominantly develops technology for the company's Lotus division and has already benefited from the fruits of Extreme Blue.
According to Bill Kearney, IBM Ireland Software Labs manager, one of the Irish projects in 2004 looked at how to harness the less structured knowledge contained in instant messages between people. Those conversations become content, which can then be presented to other business users as they carry out a relevant business process. Kearney says this concept of embedded learning will appear in future releases of IBM Workplace, a collaborative product of which a large portion is developed in Dublin.
To underline the importance that IBM places on Extreme Blue there were numerous high-level executives in town last week to see the various European teams present their ideas. The most senior of these was David Turek, vice-president for deep computing, who overseas the company's efforts around super computing and other initiatives to tackle highly complex problems with intensive computing power.
"My interest in Extreme Blue is based on the fact that it is a programmatic effort by IBM to get some of the best and brightest people around the world engaged in subject matters relevant to us," he explains.
According to Turek, the projects that the students work on are generally problems that IBM hasn't been able to solve internally - although this is not something stressed to students.
"We don't want to scare them," deadpans Turek, but adds that the new perspective that the students bring can often provide the spark needed to solve the problem.
And it seems this isn't just a case of IBM talking up the students - over the life of Extreme Blue students have made well over 200 invention disclosures, the first step on the road to filing for a patent.
Traditional wisdom is that you never let the summer work experience students loose in front of your customers. But in the last couple of years Extreme Blue participants have met with a variety of customers, including blue-chip banks, to assess customer requirements for projects.
While the Extreme Blue teams may stumble on a new and interesting approach, the real benefit in Turek's opinion is access to some of the most talented business and technology students and providing them with an insight into the IBM work culture. "We may end up hiring those people now, or at some point down the road," he says.
Extreme Blue is part of IBM's broader engagement with universities - something the company sees as strategic in feeding its R&D labs. It invested $5.6 billion (€4.6 billion) in R&D and engineering in 2004 and finding talented researchers to invest that money in is an ongoing process.
"We are trying to expand the scope of how we engage with universities," says Turek. "It's not restricted to tactical issues that we might be facing today. We're as interested in ill-formed or speculative ideas and having access to people who are comfortable with working in that kind of environment."
