Philly Area Companies on 2011 InformationWeek 500

Tom Paine

While I usually focus on the area companies that are generating cutting-edge technologies for enterprises and their users, attention should also be paid to those enterprises who do the best job of utilizing that technology. One perspective on this comes from InformationWeek, which last month published its 2011 version of the InformationWeek 500, what it says is an "annual ranking of the most innovative companies employing information technology in their businesses". Some of the local firms on the list may surprise you.

The IW 500 ranks the top 250 and then provides the remaining 250 unranked. The top ranked Greater Philidelphia region companies are:


15 Vanguard (Valley Forge)

53 Penske Truck Leasing (Reading)

56 Lehigh Valley Health Network (Allentown)

80 University of Pennsylvania Health System (Philadelphia)

129 Harleysville Group (Harleysville); two weeks ago agreed to be acquired by Nationwide.

195 Heartland Payment Systems (Princeton)

209 Teva Pharmaceuticals U.S.A. (North Wales); its acquisition of Cephalon was just cleared by FTC on Friday, with some divestiture requirements.

232 Christiana Care Health System (Wilmington)



Others named to the IW 500 but not ranked in the top 250 include Aramark (Philadelphia), CDI Corp (Philadelphia), The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (Philadelphia), New Jersey Manufacturers Insurance Co. (West Trenton), Pennsylvania Real Estate Investment Trust (Philadelphia), and VWR International
(Radnor).

Also with significant operations in the Philly area are Boeing (17), PNC Financial Services (32), and Verizon Wireless (90). SAP did not make it, but its Califiornia-based Sybase subsidiary did (38). Comcast is not on it, though the case could be made it belongs on it despite its faults. Roseland, NJ-based payroll processing giant Automatic Data Processing, which last week announced it was entering the Cloud-based Human Capital Management market, ranked 7th.

InformationWeek also profiles how the University of Pennsylvania Health System's Penn Medicine is using electronic medical records to help find candidates for clinical trial participation. Also featured are IT innovations at Lehigh Valley Health Network , Christiana Care Health System, and Vanguard.



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