This is an interesting article suggesting most of the Legacy HW makers (IBM, Cisco, HPE, HP, Xerox, Oracle) are ripe for restructure due to technology passing them by. What is interesting is they suggest IBM MAY surpass Google in the cloud via leveraging their “enterprise” relationships
https://www.barrons.com/articles/cisco-ibm-intel-and-oracle-search-for-new-life-51575056764
Full Article Outlined Here
https://outline.com/PqAnEv
or here
http://archive.is/WprQJ
Tech’s Pioneers Have Been Left Behind. Their Stocks Are Cheap—and Complicated.
By Eric J. Savitz
Nov. 29, 2019 2:46 pm ET
Article is behind a paywall and it's too long to quote in it's entirety here, as it exceeds the 9,000 character limit. So posting the excerpt with the IBM discussion here –
IBM
Big Blue might have the best chance at transforming itself for the cloud era. To be sure, the company has been trying to find the right formula for years, with a more recent focus on artificial-intelligence platform Watson and “cognitive computing.” In 2011, the Watson supercomputer’s appearance on Jeopardy! earned the AI platform plenty of fame, but not much else; humans are again breaking records on the game show. But Watson hasn’t put IBM in the AI or cloud elite. The company’s latest effort relies on its $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat in June. IBM hopes the open-source software leader can help it gain ground in the cloud—the clear target is Google, the No. 3 public cloud player after AWS and Azure.
IBM’s enterprise computing knowhow gives the company some advantages. And the company has a successful history of reinvention. It has built and sold large businesses in desktop PCs, laptops, printers, disk drives, and semiconductors. Today, IBM’s vast workforce—more than 350,000—is mostly in services and information-technology consulting.
Colony thinks that IBM can nose past Google into the cloud-computing leadership tier.
“If I had to handicap, it’s really a two-horse race between AWS and Microsoft,” he says. “Microsoft in its DNA is a software company. And the cloud is not about storage. It’s about processing data and creating software. Microsoft has succeeded in cloud as an enterprise player. Google has never really taken the enterprise very seriously. It’s their hobby, not their business. Enterprise is IBM’s business. It’s what they do, and they can pass Google.”
IBM stock is up 18% this year—well below the broad market—and it trades near an all-time low valuation of 10 times earnings estimates for the next 12 months. Investors aren’t giving the stock much chance, which means that any positive surprises could deliver big results for shareholders.