Thread regarding IBM layoffs

IBM is Almost Dead Last in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for 2020 for Public Cloud Services (see Gartner Magic Quadrant graph in the link below)

https://www.bmc.com/blogs/gartner-magic-quadrant-cips-cloud-infrastructure-platform-services/

How could this possibly happen? IBM used to be synonymous with computing. IBM was computing and set the standard for computing at one point in history. Now, IBM is almost a complete fail in public cloud computing. Most large enterprises will never go with such a low rated niche player for any technology. IBM barely beat out Tencent (Tencent???). In fact, Tencent has a larger IaaS market share than IBM. IBM couldn't even get into challenger or visionary position on the magic quadrant by, perhaps, being highly innovative. The Niche Quadrant is for the weaker Public Cloud players. Few CIO's who have any future career ambitions would risk choosing IBM given this very low Gartner positioning. It could be the end of their CIO career aspirations as everyone else is going with the top 3 (or 4) players. Imagine now choosing IBM is not a safe choice.

How hard would it have been to build a superior cloud platform (best in the industry) starting when they purchased Softlayer years ago? With IBM's computing brainpower and prodigious R&D team, it should have been relatively easy. IBM should be the cloud leader by a mile. Instead they are losing by many, many miles. It is such a sad, sad story for IBM. Who is to blame? Does it actually matter at this point? What's done is done.

by Anonymous
| 1823 views | | 6 replies (last October 14, 2020) | Reply
Post ID: @OP+17lXq5Po
Comment! It's anonymous!

6 replies (most recent on top)

IBM executives are in for the money only... they don't care about IBM, only care about their pockets... and they are deep!!

by Anonymous
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Post ID: @5rbx+17lXq5Po

Building a business is hard. Financial engineering is easy. IBM execs took the easy and greedy route.

by Anonymous
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Post ID: @5snl+17lXq5Po

The problem is the IBM culture and arrogance. The execs think they are the smartest in the marketplace and the clients and stock price will tell you otherwise.

by Anonymous
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Post ID: @1kdb+17lXq5Po

It won’t work. Too late now. CEO is an id–t.

by Anonymous
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Post ID: @1uhk+17lXq5Po

Arvind was at the center of things, but in fairness, there's plenty of blame to go around.

Softlayer was a leader in bare metal and dedicated hardware, and its execs spent years refusing to accept that the market was moving decisively to virtualization. When you spend precious time and money telling customers that they are wrong to want what they want, its not surprising that you find yourself 10 years behind the leaders. This is just one of many mistakes that their arrogance led them into (look at how far behind IBM Cloud is in almost every significant technology), but it was probably the biggest.

Then there was the financial engineering mentioned in another thread. The public cloud business is insanely capital intensive, and it was obvious to everybody from the beginning that only the largest would survive. But instead of investing the money required, IBM took billions of dollars of capital out of the company in the form of stock buybacks and dividends. AWS and even Microsoft had the courage to say to their shareholders "look, this is going to be expensive for a while, but it'll be worth it in the end". IBM did not.

And then there were the repeated false starts and "moonshots" that siphoned off talent and money and flushed it away for no apparent benefit.

  • I could go on.
by Anonymous
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Post ID: @tdb+17lXq5Po

I remember when Softlayer was an industry leader.
Arvind is singlehandedly responsible for all failings in IBM Cloud. He used to run the business unit. And this clown is now CEO, spinning off the biggest profit part of the business? His sanity needs to be checked.

by Anonymous
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Post ID: @qki+17lXq5Po

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