"Worker transformation"
Is this the new "Resource Action"?
Revenues for IBM have risen for its second successive financial quarter – after more than five years of declining sales – but only on a constant currency basis. Profit, however, dropped and Wall Street hammered Big Blue's stock price in after-hours trading. The venerable tech titan reported $19.1bn in global sales in the first …
They didn't get what they expected, so IBM gets punished.
It's never the analysts that get told to sharpen their skills, no. It's the company's fault that it didn't perform to expectations.
Alanysts should be graded on the exactitude of their forecasts. That would balance the situation somewhat.
It's typically the opposite.
Typically companies that hit or exceed their targets will experience a share price drop following a dividend announcement as the market has priced the expected dividend into the share price. i.e. yesterday the share price was the "share price"+"expected dividend", today it is just the "share price".
It's usually a short term thing as people move their money elsewhere to where they think they can make more money.
I have it on good authority, that as customers sign new, or extend existing, software licenses/support contracts, they've put "cloud" into the wording, so any IBM software running anywhere is considered "cloud" revenue. On the other hand IBM's actual cloud offering is basically unfit for purpose.
I used to work for IBM eBHS, (e-Business Hosting) we hosted the servers that customers web sites ran on. And while we sold the customer bespoke, discrete tin, it wouldn't surprise me if this activity was now considered 'cloud', after all 'cloud' is just a computer somebody else looks after.
"I used to work for IBM eBHS, (e-Business Hosting) we hosted the servers that customers web sites ran on".
It's funny for a term that was used to refer to platforms for distributed computing as early as 1993 is still causing so much confusion in 2018.
I don't think anyone should be surprised by the fact that IBM's eBusiness initiative has evolved over the years, unless of course, you think that 'Cloud' doesn't constitute the hosting of web applications?
I'm not confused, now 'Cloud' means you don't own the hardware that the web applications run on. With eBHS, the 'Hosting' part was the crux of it, we hosted the hardware, it was not shared, or scalable, or on demand, or clustered, or resilient often. It was a fixed platform, owned by the customer, no additional resources would be added unless the customer bought more. eBHS was not an abstract cloud
Depends what you are looking for from your Cloud Service Provider , I think it's fair to say Cloud has moved beyond IaaS, a repository for storing Word documents/Excel spreadsheets or even a playground for video game developers
However, the short answer to your question is, a muppet looking to avoid vendor lock-in ;-)