The current CEO has demonstrated a complete lack of leadership, or understanding of how the market place has moved on her. Her response to the last 6 years has been to save her way to prosperity via cutting the legacy work force. You don’t hire Bain unless you have plans to split, or to be acquired as undervalued assets.
Someone on the board has looked at the path of destruction created and realized that they need to sell half of the company to raise cash so that they can enhance the remaining half of the company.
My guess is IBM will embrace a new CEO and give them permission to use the money raised to acquire something new. If I had to guess it’s going to be something along the LINUX line. Why do I say that??? IBM has placed most of their eggs in the LINUX basket over the last three years (Z Linux, Power LINUX, Redhat partnership, google partnership, all cloud investments revolve around LINUX etc etc etc.).
Services as IBM has been dividing them up is the weak sister. (Eg offshore completely divorces LINUX, while near shore embraces cheap LINUX labor, and on shore embraces selling LINUX Camss services) The HW both Z and Power have bet the farm on LINUX while milking legacy and DASD has bet the farm on SW which is embraced via cloud. NET NET the new CEO will be allowed to buy their way into LINUX, and have a much leaner IBM to manage.