Posts by cdcdcd

A bit harsh

This seems pretty harsh.

When it comes to analysts you can always find one two who put either a negative or positive spin on any company results. The most important thing for IBM in these figures, from looking at a range of opinions, are the ones pertaining to SaaS and more general service offerings which grew by 18% in 2018 from the 2017 figure. That's massive growth in what is the most profitable part of the enterprise tech. sector - and justifies the hike in share price.

For the life of my I don't know why IBM didn't just stick to SaaS and develop tools for the cloud sector in general. The IaaS is profitable but no where near as SaaS. I'm guessing they felt they needed to replace the shrinking mainframe market. They have been relatively successful here too. It might seem fair to criticise IBM for pooling every related thing under the cloud term (I don't know anything about this) but that's what most companies have done. I remember hearing similar criticism of MS a few years back; often their cloud business was just their old business for which there was little growth and now look at it. MS is the world's most valuable company and Azure is catching up on AWS fast.

I think this article is very unfair. A lot of the growth in sales of mainframes are part of hybrid contracts. In short one part of the business doesn't eat the other. The move to hybrid approaches is significant within massive data hungry industries such as banking and petroleum. IBM have acquired and renewed many such contracts over the last year and this will likely to have involved upgrading existing "on-site" hardware. in short the analysts point of view is not very meaningful without that context.