There are two futures for IBM:
- Continued slide to irrelevance
- Bold moves requiring some big risks
What are some things you would all do for 2?
15 replies (most recent on top)
IBM management is too inwardly focused and have zero idea of what is going on in the competitive landscape. Call it self absorbed. They proved it when they couldn’t adjust to Intel and had to have Gerstner save them. They are again proving it by not being able to adjust to cloud and will sooner or later have to have an outsider come in to save them. What’s the problem Too much focus on looking inwardly, and not enough focus on beating the competition. You need a non-biased new captain to steer the ship and not prolong the bad habits picked up over the past 20 years. The board tried to split the baby by making Whitehurst IBM President, BUT he realized he could effect change due to AK implementing past bad behavior. Until IBM management realizes they are the problem via perpetuating past bad behavior, and starts dealing with it, IBM will not change
Tallying the votes and looks like more for the option 2?
The bold move would be by the board and go outside IBM for CEO and executives that would do to fix the broken machine and not just RA, did financial engineering and throwing out buzz words without knowing what they mean
IBM is not fixable... GAME OVER!
How to fix IBM....fire the C-Suite and the army of VPs who kiss their a$$es...uhhh....I mean....who report to them....and hire competent people.
Ibm doesn't need another HW business they can't run.
Their mistake is accepting defeat in public cloud.
Build a niche public cloud for all mainframe customers, not hybrid "bu-----t" cloud and cover that whole market segment.
But Ak, svps and the board are f-king clueless.
ARM would cost IBM at least $50B which is 10x more than we have after Red Hat indigestion.
And we would destroy it completely.
stick with MF and sell everything else
Bold moves: Swoop in for ARM when the acquisition by Nvidia fails to get regulatory approval. And then:
- Run ARM as a pure IP licensing business - do not attempt to make ARM systems or even chips yourself. (Competing with your own licensees is always a bad business model, something that IBM never seems to learn.) Continue to license it freely and fairly to everybody that wants to put one in a device.
- Create a system architecture for ARM datacenter servers in particular, with a well-defined long-term roadmap for CPU evolution and hardware support (e.g. storage interconnects, PCIe gen 5, 6, etc.) and hard security, optimizations for virtualization and containerization. Do it in collaboration with the Big Three/Four cloud providers to ensure it meets their needs. Allow enough variation for the cloud providers to offer distinction, but enough commonality that binaries/containers can run in any cloud without change [note: this is not the case with existing Cloud ARM offerings, each of which is unique]. This is a necessary step to get widespread ARM adoption in the cloud (compare the personal computer market before IBM accidentally created the PC standard. This time it should be intentional).
- DO NOT CREATE AN IBM-BRANDED datacenter ARM server. I know I'm repeating myself, but this is really important to the success of the IP. DO optimize RHEL/CoreOS for the ARM datacenter system architecture.
- Put Power on a long glide to a soft landing, encourage people to migrate to datacenter ARM.
- Consider splitting the company (again) between hardware and software: HW would be ARM licensing and IP; Mainframe (cash cow); Power in a managed EOL; and maybe storage HW in a managed EOL because I can't imagine anybody else wanting to buy it. SW would be RedHat, the Cloud division (whatever that is called this quarter), and whatever bits of storage software have value.
Unfortunately, there is not even one new technology on the horizon that the bigger more agile players are not already heavily investing (more money than IBM even has) in. IBM never truly understood the deep ramifications and disruptions of ubiquitous internet availability, and almost completely missed that boat. I don't mean slapping TCP/IP on every existing app, or repackaging legacy mainframe stuff into containers and shoveling it into a cloud. I mean they missed out rethinking everything based on peer-to-peer, social, mobile, distributed cloud, streaming, collaborative work tools, resource sharing, and so on. And so the other companies will continue to replace whatever IBM still has.
Leaving IBM with only option 1.
Let's layoffs more people... just to see if that improves IBM's trajectory...
oh wait, it is already planned... 1 Billion already set aside for Q1 2022, Happy New Year early y'all!
No point to discuss... IBM will not change until a new CEO is picked and installed from outside of IBM, think Lou Gerstner. Any CEOs from named from inside the company will continue on the financial engineering trajectory.
Super bold move for IBM management, that is not so bold for people outside of the circle, is to reduce management layers by 50 to 75%.
Ensure Mainframe clients see improved price performance going forward. Today, an introduction to Mainframe pricing is a one week class - for crying out loud! It is super complex and a patchwork of "enhancements" not even IBM understands.
The clients now know this is IBM's cash cow, which is why they are leaving in drones. Stop this migration off the Mainframe should be IBM's priority one in my mind.
Unfortunately I don't see this happen. All writings on the wall is about RH and hybrid cloud and AI.
I think they need to examine consumerism, just doing B2B, micro google, aws all have a presence in that area.