Ginni Rometty

By Daniel Eisenberg

On a steamy day last July, IBM had just announced a deal to buy the consulting arm of PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) for $3.5 billion, and Virginia Rometty, known to friends and customers alike as Ginni, had been tapped to head the new division. As Rometty, 45, was shuttled around New York City from one TV studio to another for interviews about the big news, the Chicago native insisted on taking time to call a few of her major customers to assure them that she would stay involved in their accounts during the transition.

It was vintage Rometty, whose people skills and relentless focus on the customer have some IBM insiders discussing her as future CEO material. At a time when many companies are increasingly skeptical about investing in new IT projects, Rometty is charged with making Big Blue--already the world's largest IT-services company, with $35 billion in annual revenues--into an even more pervasive presence in corporations. Her job is to persuade big customers to do one-stop shopping at IBM, to make it as dominant in high-level-strategy consulting as it is today in maintenance and outsourcing. By tapping the vast Rolodex and industry expertise of PWC, Rometty is counting on IBM to help devise a client's strategy, redesign such key business processes as human resources and finance, and in many cases run those departments and their sophisticated software, as IBM already does for United Technologies' procurement and Nextel's customer service. Says Rometty: "We're creating a new category of services."

Long before IBM had established much credibility as an objective adviser, Rometty had created a lucrative consulting division for the insurance sector. More recently, she helped land a $4 billion, seven-year deal with American Express, which will rely on IBM to provide IT on a pay-as-you-go "utility" basis. She has also been busy trying to help close another $5 billion outsourcing deal with J.P. Morgan Chase. "She has a great ability to gain the confidence of executives, including CEOs," says her boss, Doug Elix, head of Global Services. Rometty is already winning admirers at PWC as well, in part by not imposing IBM's hierarchical culture on the collegial former partnership. With IBM shifting $1 billion of R. and D. to services, Rometty has a lot riding on her new job, but it doesn't faze her. Her favorite sport, after all, is scuba diving, and that, she points out, is "98% calm and 2% terror." --By Daniel Eisenberg