No one has an office at the new IBM building in the Beltline – yet everyone has a view out the windows.

Instead of private offices, there are strategically placed interview rooms and meeting rooms where managers can hold conversations that have to remain confidential.

Five hundred of IBM’s 650 Calgary employees work out of the new building, which officially opened on Monday. They came from other locations in the Encor and Sun Life buildings, while another group remains at Shaw Court.

Bringing all the staff together under one roof, including the employees of the PricewaterhouseCoopers consulting practice that IBM recently bought, will be examined at a later date, says Mary McCarthy, IBM’s senior location executive in Calgary.

The new building certainly gives IBM more expansion options in Calgary.

IBM photos
Every employee has access to a window at the new IBM building on 11th Avenue S.W. between 2nd and 3rd Streets.

Employees were included in the design decisions and choices of interior themes. “The employees really feel that they own the building,” says McCarthy. “It’s their building.”

The themes are Alberta-centric, including a Rockies motif on the ground floor and heritage and Stampede themes on the second floor.

Wall panelling in light-tan English sycamore and off-white metal panels with a baked enamel finish run throughout the building. Frosted glass in many areas creates privacy while allowing natural light through.

The building is introduced by a river rock theme in the lobby. The flooring pattern runs right into the elevators in one direction and to the doors in the other.

Customer areas on the first floor feature connectivity, including voice-over-Internet telephony and Net access on a system separate from IBM’s corporate system. All the tables have anchors for laptop cable locks.



The first-floor auditorium – called the Rocky Mountain Room – is set up for presentations to employees or customers. It is divisible and one end can be set up for product demonstrations of IBM technologies.

A mobility centre with 38 workstations serves the 200 Calgary-area IBM employees who telecommute. Their number includes those who work from home and those who work mostly from the sites of IBM customers.

Teleworkers’ phone numbers stay the same and are transferred to wherever they are that day. IBM has 13 mobility centres across Canada serving 5,000 of its employees, says McCarthy. They also serve staff travelling on business – if she were in Toronto, McCarthy could get all her messages at a cubicle in a mobility centre there.

The employee work areas feature higher cubicle dividers near passageways and white noise to prevent office conversation from disturbing others. With those areas on the outer parts of the floors, the centres of the office floors have lounges for collaborative work – again with complete connectivity.

The new building was developed by Bentall Development Services of Vancouver. IBM is leasing it as the sole tenant and occupies 3.75 of the five floors. IBM’s Calgary employees offer a range of the company’s products and services.

“Customers are asking for technical solutions to their business challenges and opportunities,” says McCarthy. “To do that, you need hardware, software and services.” Services are the fastest- growing part of the business and include strategic outsourcing and IT consulting in a range of industries.

IBM employees must understand different industries to design solutions for particular businesses. To that end, employees focus on industries found in Alberta.

“When you look at our customers, you have to have the background and talents for diverse solutions,” says McCarthy.

“Diverse solutions need diverse people.”