Global CIO: The Top 10 Most Influential IT Vendors (Apple And Facebook?)

#1 IBM. Smarter Planet, analytics, cloud computing, workload-optimized systems, blazing new hardware, powerful end-to-end stack components, deep and broad services: about the only area in which IBM is not the leader of among the leaders is in a rich mobile strategy. I put Smarter Planet and analytics out in front of this list because IBM, for all of its vast capabilities, has distinguished itself and is continuing to distinguish itself as the IT company that can help your company make the jump from transactions to interactions, from perfecting your past to inventing your future, and from having to react to customers' changing needs to being able to anticipate and meet them.

IBM doesn't just do business in about 200 countries around the world—rather, it has a single global operation with facilities in every relevant country on the planet. And that's a model that many other companies, either inside or outside the IT business, are trying to emulate.

It has jettisoned various product lines in both hardware and software—as well as networking—to be able to focus on markets in which IBM can deliver business value to its customers and significant financial returns to its investors. IBM might no longer be the biggest IT company in the world, but in my estimation it is surely the most influential.

So that's the top 5, made up of two traditional powerhouses and three very different types of tech companies that had been outliers but are now massively influential insiders.

Whether you choose to argue that those three companies have moved into the enterprise-IT domain, or that the boundaries around the world of IT have moved outward to now encompass Facebook and Apple and Google (I believe the latter), the unmistakable fact is that the IT world is no longer ruled by the forces that drove it for the past three or four decades.

I'd urge CIOs to sit down with your top managers and with your C-level peers and draw up your own list based on your company's strategic goals for the next several years: who's in, and who's out?

Size matters, of course, but that's no longer the major differentiator: instead it's nimbleness, vision, and customer-centered innovation.

IBM, Apple, Facebook, Oracle, and Google. Who's next? Find out later this week.

RECOMMENDED READING: UPDATE: Global CIO: Top 10 Most Influential IT Vendors, Part 2 (Microsoft And HP?) Global CIO: Google CEO Eric Schmidt's Top 10 Reasons Mobile Is #1 Global CIO: Oracle –Sun A Bad Deal? Only A Fool Would Say That Global CIO: Larry Ellison And The New Oracle Rock The Tech World Global CIO: Will Social Media Kill The CIO? Global CIO: IBM's Top Product Exec On Strategy, Systems, & Oracle Global CIO: The Awesome Transformative Power Of The Apple iPad Global CIO: Is IBM Or Apple The World's #1 Tech Brand? Global CIO: IBM's Blazing New MainframeWins Raves From Citigroup Global CIO: 10 Reasons CIOs Will Get Fired This Year Bob Evans is senior VP and director of InformationWeek's Global CIO unit.

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