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It’ll be interesting to see where the new CEO takes IBM and what his strategy is to make IBM relevant again. The last decade has been stagnant (if you’re being

It’ll be interesting to see where the new CEO takes IBM and what his strategy is to make IBM relevant again. The last decade has been stagnant (if you’re being nice) and abysmal (if you’re being honest) for IBM, missing out on all the forecasted tech growth categories. Cloud services, they’re never even in the discussion. Mobile - forget it. AI...maybe. They need to find a niche they can excel in, 1 least, in order to create the buzz needed to make them a relevant company again.

tssva 7y ago
I'm not going to argue that IBM is currently healthy and performing as they should but they did have over $22 billion in cloud revenue for 2019 so they are evidently in the discussion somewhere.
- tenebrisalietum 7y ago
  Also couldn't they basically sit on their rear and collect on mainframe contracts from now until the end of time?
  - bluedevil2k 7y ago
    On Wall Street, if you’re not growing, you’re dying.
    - lotsofpulp 7y ago
      They’re stock price is the same as it was in 2010, so the market is clearly not expecting great things.
  - thrower123 7y ago
    Their consulting business should also basically print money. They aren't great, objectively, but they are far ahead of the average in that sector.
  - kjs3 7y ago
    No. There's immense pressure on the mainframe market; there's a constant drumbeat of mainframe-killer tech that's definitely better/faster/stronger (and, on rare occasions, is...at least for some narrowly defined workload). IBM has to work very hard keep mainframes competitive technology, and even harder at sales/marketing to fend off the alternatives.
    - passer_byer 7y ago
      What competitive technology are you thinking here? IBM z-series mainframe carry enormous amounts of transaction workloads today. They are deeply embedded in most of the Fortune 1000 companies. Hitachi was the only real competitor left standing and they dumped their mainframe business in 2017 since they were unable to get traction outside of Japan. In the early 90's, there were efforts by customers to get rid of their mainframes which put IBM on the ropes then, until Lou Gerstner took over as CEO and stabilized the business. It's not like these transaction workloads can be easily ported elsewhere since some of them go back as far as the early 1970's. Those customers able to ditch their mainframes did so a while back. The rest of these systems will remain due to risks and costs of migrating to a suitable alternative. It's not a huge revenue stream for IBM, but a very profitable one.
      - 9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago
        But mainframe customers are still dumping them, and they're not picking IBM: https://cloud.google.com/press-releases/2020/0121/sabre-and-google-cloud-partnership/ https://cloud.google.com/press-releases/2020/0121/sabre-and-... Note that SABRE is the OG enterprise app, by most measures it was the first non-military/govt/research computer system, going live in 1960 (!) and the core still runs System/360 (which they had to migrate to, not from!).
      - kjs3 7y ago
        What exactly did you say that you think I didn't?
- sjm-lbm 7y ago
  They have a single-digit share of the market, though (lots of sources say that, but here's one: https://www.canalys.com/newsroom/cloud-market-share-q4-2018-and-full-year-2018 https://www.canalys.com/newsroom/cloud-market-share-q4-2018-... ). As someone who was using them until recently, I think that they really bungled the Softlayer acquisition. They didn't invest in their product offerings for years while AWS pulled ahead - and while they have been investing pretty heavily more recently, they are so far behind it's a little sad.
- pmart123 7y ago
  They are moving whatever they can to count as cloud and bought RedHat to continue to “grow” cloud as they probably ran out of things to move.
- Sylamore 7y ago
  Having compared IBM's cloud offerings against AWS, Azure and GCP... the vast majority of what IBM is calling cloud is a stretch. In my current engagement them running another companies servers in that companies datacenters == "cloud".

tssva 7y ago

I'm not going to argue that IBM is currently healthy and performing as they should but they did have over $22 billion in cloud revenue for 2019 so they are evidently in the discussion somewhere.

tenebrisalietum 7y ago
Also couldn't they basically sit on their rear and collect on mainframe contracts from now until the end of time?
- bluedevil2k 7y ago
  On Wall Street, if you’re not growing, you’re dying.
  - lotsofpulp 7y ago
    They’re stock price is the same as it was in 2010, so the market is clearly not expecting great things.
- thrower123 7y ago
  Their consulting business should also basically print money. They aren't great, objectively, but they are far ahead of the average in that sector.
- kjs3 7y ago
  No. There's immense pressure on the mainframe market; there's a constant drumbeat of mainframe-killer tech that's definitely better/faster/stronger (and, on rare occasions, is...at least for some narrowly defined workload). IBM has to work very hard keep mainframes competitive technology, and even harder at sales/marketing to fend off the alternatives.
  - passer_byer 7y ago
    What competitive technology are you thinking here? IBM z-series mainframe carry enormous amounts of transaction workloads today. They are deeply embedded in most of the Fortune 1000 companies. Hitachi was the only real competitor left standing and they dumped their mainframe business in 2017 since they were unable to get traction outside of Japan. In the early 90's, there were efforts by customers to get rid of their mainframes which put IBM on the ropes then, until Lou Gerstner took over as CEO and stabilized the business. It's not like these transaction workloads can be easily ported elsewhere since some of them go back as far as the early 1970's. Those customers able to ditch their mainframes did so a while back. The rest of these systems will remain due to risks and costs of migrating to a suitable alternative. It's not a huge revenue stream for IBM, but a very profitable one.
    - 9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago
      But mainframe customers are still dumping them, and they're not picking IBM: https://cloud.google.com/press-releases/2020/0121/sabre-and-google-cloud-partnership/ https://cloud.google.com/press-releases/2020/0121/sabre-and-... Note that SABRE is the OG enterprise app, by most measures it was the first non-military/govt/research computer system, going live in 1960 (!) and the core still runs System/360 (which they had to migrate to, not from!).
    - kjs3 7y ago
      What exactly did you say that you think I didn't?
sjm-lbm 7y ago
They have a single-digit share of the market, though (lots of sources say that, but here's one: https://www.canalys.com/newsroom/cloud-market-share-q4-2018-and-full-year-2018 https://www.canalys.com/newsroom/cloud-market-share-q4-2018-... ). As someone who was using them until recently, I think that they really bungled the Softlayer acquisition. They didn't invest in their product offerings for years while AWS pulled ahead - and while they have been investing pretty heavily more recently, they are so far behind it's a little sad.
pmart123 7y ago
They are moving whatever they can to count as cloud and bought RedHat to continue to “grow” cloud as they probably ran out of things to move.
Sylamore 7y ago
Having compared IBM's cloud offerings against AWS, Azure and GCP... the vast majority of what IBM is calling cloud is a stretch. In my current engagement them running another companies servers in that companies datacenters == "cloud".