IBM old guard dropping like flies in POWER and cloud restructure IBM software veteran Robert LeBlanc is stepping down after just two years heading the firm's growing cloud business. Chief executive Ginni Rometty announced LeBlanc's planned departure on Wednesday as part of a restructuring of IBM's cloud and POWER hardware units. LeBlanc, who joined IBM in 1981, will retire in June. IBM has …
Systems, in general, are rapidly commoditizing. This has been going for years with companies moving to Linux on whatever x86 server is least costly as their compute standard, away from costly proprietary systems. The model of the future will be Google's model (AWS is trying to do what Google does) where you have zero proprietary systems or software in the infrastructure. Not a lick of IBM, Cisco, Oracle, EMC, etc... or even Intel in the near future. The cloud hyper scalers will then scale that incredibly low cost (and high reliability, performance) model to the moon.
After 16y with IBM one thing I learned, that company could lose 80% of execs/VPs and no one would notice. There are so many execs playing constant musical chairs with no apparent actual job responsibilities that I wonder how much more profitable they'd be if they went from the 13 levels of management that were above me down to half that.
I love IBM, it's Power systems and Storage, but IBM Cloud (Bluemix) service is slack-baked. Recently I wrote 4 or 5 letters to their Support and none of them was answered by human. After few days I went to their chat and finally got some kind of answer (which didn't help me anyway). On the contrary, yesterday, I had to recover loss of my Multi-Factor Authentication device for Amazon AWS. Just in 10 minutes after my message I got a phone call from US and in 5 minutes we were done. The engineer was professional, fast and polite. It used to be like that in IBM too. :(
'Cloud' requires a huge change of culture within IBM, it used to be the goal to sell hardware, then sell support and services on the back of that, basically the customer gives IBM money, then IBM makes more money.
Cloud requires IBM investing in hardware up front, at it's own cost, then just selling a service. The Hardware and support revenue is a recoverable cost now. That's a bit precarious, and others are providing serious competition, Google, Rackspace, AWS, etc,.... customers are also expecting cost savings, so this is also a race to the bottom.
We are aggressively reinventing our systems portfolio for cloud, data and AI," Rometty said. "The centrepiece of Cognitive Systems is our Power franchise, which is vital to so many clients and ecosystem partners. Having envisioned and transformed our data and analytics portfolio, Bob is ideally suited for this role
Inconceivable. "An' I do not thin' those words min what they thin' they min.'" Or anything of substance for that matter.
And by the way--Bob's your uncle, (Been looking to sneak that into a post for a couple of years now.)
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