October 9, 2000

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Women In Technology
Janet Perna, IBM

By Rick Whiting

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hile attending a meeting of IBM executives in Florida several years ago, Janet Perna, general manager of IBM's data-management division, joined more than 100 of her fellow managers in a golf match. Despite the fact that most of the players were men, Perna hit the longest drive that day. That evening, CEO Lou Gerstner noted Perna's feat while speaking at a dinner for the managers, and the story has become something of a legend at IBM.

"It was a fluke, because I really stink," Perna says of her golf game. "But timing is everything." That story, and how she tells it, is quintessential Perna: high achievement combined with a great deal of modesty.

In the nine years since Perna took charge of IBM's database organization, its DB2 product has become a force in the database market, giving Oracle a run for its money.

Last year, IBM held a 30% share of the database market, just one percentage point behind Oracle, according to research firm Dataquest. And DB2 posted sales growth of 125% and 70% on Windows NT and Unix platforms, respectively. Not bad for a database that once ran only on mainframes.

Despite those achievements, Perna maintains a relatively low profile and is clearly uncomfortable when talking about herself. Unlike managers who lead from within the spotlight, Perna's leadership style emphasizes team building. That approach, combined with her faith in--and empathy for--those who work with her and for her, instills a fierce loyalty among co-workers.

"She has a huge organization, and yet she has all the time to pay atten-tion to an individual's personal details," says Patricia Selinger, director of database integration, who has worked with Perna in various roles since the 1980s. "Because of that, people would follow her off a cliff. I know I would."

Perna grew up in the Poughkeepsie, N.Y., area surrounded by IBM facilities, but her first job wasn't with IBM. In the early 1970s, she started teaching high school math in Middletown, N.Y. In 1974, she moved to California ("I was bored with life," she says), and snagged a programming job at IBM's internal operations in San Jose. She moved into product development at IBM's Santa Teresa Laboratory in San Jose in 1981, and was given the task of managing a 30-person team developing a new Cobol compiler for S/390 mainframes.

"I learned later that they couldn't get anyone to take this job because the project was in trouble," Perna says. "I've never been afraid to try, to take a risk. But that time it was out of ignorance."

From there, Perna moved into a series of database-product-management roles, including DB2 for mainframes, before moving to IBM's operations in Toronto in 1991 to oversee efforts to build a database for Unix, Windows NT, and OS/2 systems. The project had bogged down, and, as director of database technology, Perna was given the task of getting it back on track.

FactFile

Title: General manager of the data management division at IBM Years at IBM: 26 Previous positions at IBM: Programmer; various product management positions; director of database technology Previous positions at other companies: High school math teacher Education: B.A. in math from New York University Personal status: Single, no children Hobbies: Golf, cooking ("anything that requires a ot of chopping"), hiking in the Sierras Future goals: Maintaining a high-performance culture at IBM that attracts and retains the highest caliber people; finding more time to work with children to encourage them to study math and science.

Perna put together a team to build the new database, pulling developers from Unix compiler projects and mainframe database groups, and hiring some 200 new employees in a three-month period. "It was like a startup within IBM," she says. In something of a gamble, Perna chose to use leading-edge code that the data-management group's research team had developed as the foundation for the new product, instead of acquiring technology from outside or using an OS/2-based database that IBM already owned.

"She was willing to take the risk and trust the research team, even though we didn't really know much about developing production-ready software," Selinger says. The gamble paid off, and IBM began shipping DB2 for Unix in 1993.

In 1996, Perna was named to her current position and moved to IBM's software operations headquarters in Somers, N.Y., where she assembled a DB2 sales and marketing team. "Janet is great at execution. She gets the job done," says Steve Mills, who as senior VP and group executive of IBM's software group is Perna's boss. Mills, in fact, has appointed Perna to every position she has held for the last 12 years. He calls her "one of the best coaches in IBM," specifically noting her team-building work with the DB2 project, and praises her ability to connect with front-line workers. "Janet's never lost sight of the work. She instills tremendous loyalty," Mills says.

That extends to IBM customers as well. "I can always pick up the phone and get a response from her personally or from her organization," says Jane Landon, CIO of Prudential Institutional, a division of the Prudential Insurance Co. of America that provides insurance and employee-benefit services to businesses. Landon's faith stems from 1997, when Perna's team helped Prudential install a massive 17-terabyte data warehouse (using DB2 Universal Extended Edition running on IBM's SP2 server) for its consumer insurance operation. "When she promises something, I know she can deliver," Landon says of Perna.

Perna doesn't see many barriers for women in the IT industry, particularly at IBM. Because the competition for talent is so fierce today, she says, companies must "develop everyone to their full potential." Perna's yardstick for judging whether women are treated equally is how often they're given the opportunity to tackle the tough jobs. "I've been given tough jobs," she says. "Clearly, I don't see any glass ceiling at IBM." Recently, Perna was appointed to IBM's World Management Council, a prestigious advisory board to CEO Gerstner.

Women make up more than 30% of IBM employees in the United States, and a quarter of its managers nationwide, according to the company. The number of women holding executive positions at IBM in the United States has increased from less than 2% in 1980 to almost 21% at the end of last year. Worldwide, women hold almost 21% of IBM's executive posts. Early this year, the company received a Catalyst Award, a prize given every year by Catalyst, a nonprofit research and advisory services organization, that recognizes outstanding initiatives to advance women in business.

Still, Perna says, more needs to be done to encourage young women to pursue careers in math, science, and engineering. "The biggest problem we have is getting girls to study math and science in high school," she says. Perna sits on the steering committee of IBM's Reinventing Education program, which since 1994 has contributed $35 million in grants to provide computers to classrooms from kindergarten through 12th grade.

Perna sees herself as a team builder who creates an environment in which others can succeed. But many who work with her see even more. "She's a great role model for other women who aspire to higher positions within the organization," Mills says. "She's a role model not just for women, but for men as well."

Continue on to profile of Kathleen Earley, AT&T
Return to profile of Ann Livermore, Hewlett-Packard

Photo by Steve Castillo

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