back to article IBM defies hardware woes with record 2008

There's a lot of bad economic news floating around, but there wasn't much coming out of Armonk, New York, today as IBM reported its financial results for the fourth quarter of 2008. Despite the Meltdown, IBM reached record revenue, pre-tax profit, cash flow, and earnings per share levels in 2008, thanks to a strong close in the …

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  1. mr mojo risin
    Alert

    My hats off to IBM

    Sun's 20% layoff day is Thursday.

    There's really only two IT players left. HP and IBM.

    Everyone else is a has been.

  2. Liam Johnson
    Happy

    Record 2008

    I had a record 2008 too, in fact it was the best 2008 since records began!

  3. al
    Unhappy

    Why don't you compare these number..

    ...against HP and Dell in the same period.

    It might tell you that IBM is losing some turf on x86 space. (by how much ? you do the math, you get paid for it).

  4. Ian Michael Gumby
    Alert

    Lets get some facts straight...

    First, to the author, IBM renamed the DB2 pillar in Software Group to Information Management.

    Naming your Brand and your product the same name was a dumb idea. (Lotus is a brand. Notes is a product. DB2 was the brand, DB2 was the product. Now its IM or Information Management and Informix, Datastage, DB2, etc are the products)

    Second, if the rumors are true, IBM is laying off 16K employees in the US. I believe most of this restructuring is in Global Services. (When the market upticks, IBM will re-create these jobs, but not in the US or EMEA, but in India or some other low cost center of the world.)

    Third, the only reason IBM is doing ok is that it has 3 areas to pull in revenue. Services, Hardware and Software group.

    Neither HP nor Sun have those 3 major divisions. Sun , while they would like to call themselves a well rounded company is still a hardware company. Sun hasn't figured out how to make money off of software (Java, MySQL) and have traditionally used them as a tease to sell more hardware.

    IBM hopes that the new Obama administration does push forward with some tech initiatives. IBM would love to land those accounts, keep the margins, and employ more people in India.

    (That wasn't a joke.)

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    ... and the sackings will continue until morale improves

    Heard from several folks today that the 'packages' for a 'resource action' in the software group went out this morning.... rumours are 15% of SWG's workforce

    Can we get a SammyP with horns icon?

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Stop

    RE: Lets get some facts straight...

    HP doesn't have a services, software or hardware division to pull in the numbers?

    Last time I checked the hardware business was churning in more money than IBM, the software group was steadily producing profit (ok maybe not on the scale as IBM but they're still the 6th largest software company out there) and as for services it's probably slipped you by that HP is second to IBM in services although the aquisition of EDS will make HP an even bigger threat to Big Blue.

    Dell and Sun are are the ones who should be bricking it

  7. Ian Michael Gumby

    @AC re HP Services...

    Yes, you are correct. HP has EDS.

    But how long ago did they purchase EDS?

    Compare that to IBM's 3 division approach.

    My point was that IBM has 3 core sources to draw from and a large customer base that is used to at least one or more of their division's products. IBM also resells competitors products too.

    I think that with the focus on Sun as an example is to show the direction that Sun wants to go, but they have a lot of ground to make up.

    If we look at Sun's software, Java as a language, Glassfish as an app server, and JavaDB/MySQL as their database platforms. (I'm sure I am missing stuff ) The point is that Sun has software, but how are they making money from it.

    I know that AC2 was more defensive of HP. Yes HP has software yet it doesn't really have the brand recognition that IBM has. HP's notable stuff is more on par with IBM's Tivoli.

    EDS vs BCS? Not on the same level. EDS is more of a Tier 2 GSI. (Yeah IMHO ;-)

    Does that make sense?

    BTW, I really want to hear more about today's blood letting. My guess was that the cuts were mainly in BCS/IGS. But from the sound of it, I'm way off base. :-(

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