Year over year compares are looking terrible. More cuts coming in the US in 2019
Every business unit down with Systems the worst.
The Red Hat purchase will help obfuscate the numbers, but strategic imperatives have stopped growing.
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Another round of layoffs Wednesday. Hiring at an all time high, lots of new young faces and escorting the 40+ employees out of the building while denying it in the press.
@1yfr this is correct regarding the GBS focus. GBS competitors don’t prefix every group with the word “Cloud” because they know Cloud is commodity and most companies are targeting beyond Cloud now. I have had many really interesting chats with partners at competitor firms in which we talk about this industry view. I’ve tried to share this competitive intelligence with my leadership but nobody listens. GBS is strategically steered by people who are too distant from clients and would rather keep their heads in the sand.
Of course there are still strategic initiatives. Cloud, cognitive, and security. Mobile, and social are done. Services has structured itself around cloud, cognitive and security. Why is IBM slicing up 922 and 880 boxes and selling them in the cloud. BECAUSE IBM is terrible at dealing with commodity, so move all commodity boxes to the cloud and dump the sales, support, and marketing Will IBM keep enterprise boxes and their customers. WHY. Because enterprise is where the money is at (ISV wise, support wise(dr, ha, database, legacy code, network, etc etc) and monopoly wise). Look for SWG to be restructured around Redhat and move into the ISV, and middleware space for enterprise customers. It’s where innovation will live,BUT there will be a whole lot of legacy replacement living there too. WHY. Again it’s where the money is at Everyone outside of enterprise can go to a self service portal in the cloud and live with what’s offered there. IBM doesn’t care. Follow the costs. Everything that reduces costs (headcount, OEM, enterprise boxes vs Scale out, automation, cloud, etc etc) will be embraced, and everything that raises those costs, will be exited over time. Cloud lowers costs by 10x over time. There is a reason Amazon and Microsoft have embraced it. It’s not because it does a great deal of innovative things, but rather that it lowers costs by getting you to Embrace their automation.
IBM announced on the last earnings call that they no longer will break out financial results by strategic imperatives.
In GBS there has definitely been an increasing feel that focus is shifting from AI/Analytics/Data/Cybersecurity/Blockchain/IOT/Healthcare to "Hybrid/Multi-Cloud" over the last few months. Which makes no sense, since all those things run on or pertain to cloud. It feels like we're moving backwards, down the stack, to lower value infrastructure stuff.
Are there still strategic imperatives? What are they? No line of business is spared from RAs and chaotic management. If something was a strategic imperative we should see something good happening.