At some point, IBM was an undisputed leader and benchmark in the computer industry. When Apple tried to carve out a place in personal computing, it was IBM it was being compared to.
A series of management errors were causing that leadership to be lost. Compaq and other clone makers of their cheaper computers pulled it out of personal computing. Although they were pioneers of mobile devices and smart watches, nOr they had the vision of Google and Apple and the company was late to the cloud.
I have been following the developer portal from IBM. More or less since they released Lotus Simphony, an improved version of OpenOffice (in the pre LibreOffice era) with Linux support, a decent interface, and a browser. It always caught my attention that having such interesting developments could not transform them into competitive products. Fortunately, that seems about to change as its managers are determined to let go.
As it became known last Thursday, the more than century-old company decided to ditch traditional computing services to focus on the promising fields of cloud computing and artificial intelligence.
IBM arrived late to this market, a sector in which Amazon pioneered with its Amazon Web Service product in 2006 and which was soon joined by Google and Microsoft, among other players.nores, which was even joined by the marketing giant WalMart. To make up for lost time, the company pushed the development of cloud software and services and bought Red Hat in 2018. Red Hat is one of the most successful developers and distributors of open source software and tools for the cloud.
The future of IBM
In an interview, Ginni Rometty, CEO and former CEO of IBM, said that cloud computing, enhanced by artificial intelligence, "is now IBM's ultimate platform." His successor Arvind Krishna, who became CEO this year, called the announcement of the company's redefinition "a historic day."
To tell the truth, I know it is an inevitable change for corporate IT service providers. Most of the new software is created as a cloud service, and is distributed over the Internet from remote data centers. The cloud computing model gives corporate customers more flexibility and cost savings. Cloud services are sold as a pay-as-you-go service or annual subscriptions.
Changes
Over the years, IBM divested itself of declining profitable businesses to focus on more profitable products and services. It did so for example with its lines of personal computers, disk drives and chip manufacturing.
From now on, eThe core business will include its cloud operations and its hardware, software and consulting services units and will operate under the IBM name. These businesses generate about three-quarters of the firm's revenue.
On the other hand, an independent company with a public stock exchange will be created that will be in charge of providing traditional technological services.s maintenance, support and updating of the IT operations of thousands of corporate clients. Although it is still a burgeoning business with sales of around $ 19 billion a year, it is a market that has an expiration date. According to some versions, the new company could be merged with an existing one.
In this way, the company tries to reverse years of poor economic performance. Last year, the company's revenue fell 3 percent to $ 77 billion. This is because the loss of profitability of traditional services ate the profits that the company obtained from the cloud and artificial intelligence.
The new IBM will be a smaller company, but focused. If you achieve your goal of integrating artificial intelligence technologies to the cloud, we will see some very interesting things. And, more importantly, from a company that has been betting on open source long before it was a business.