Thread regarding IBM layoffs

Monopoly overlap? It seems to me that Google, Apple, and even Amazon have very little overlap with IBM. IBM has a 40-50billion dollar monopoly in mainframe and their associated services, but no one who might bid, competes with them there

Hmm, seems the covid craziness is spreading. Do you imagine for a single second, that even if there was the slightest interest in this level of megacorp acquisition that it wouldn't just run up against monopoly legislation in just about every territory that both parties operate in..?

Exactly. Why the hell would Apple want anything IBM has. Its got nothing other than a bunch of problems and headaches. IBM is simply no longer relevant with shrinking profit and revenue.

Nobody's mentioning Watson, Blockchain, or IOT as reasons to acquire IBM. HJow come?

Every division is profitable, just look at the quarterly results. The question is whether they can maintain the profitability, and hopefully grow. By the low EPS ratio, the investors believe the business is unlikely to grow. In order to maintain the stock price, hard-earned cash is used to pay dividend and buy back stocks, instead of investing in R&D and hiring talent. This is a good deal for the top level executives who are paid tens of millions of $ in the form of stocks. But it's not good for investors and customers, but they can leave if they choose to. But it's a really rotten deal for the current employees.

Several IBM divisions could be profitable providing you remove all the internal IBM bloat.

@1epz+15ujOd8M Google and Apple do not care about IBM's oddball definition of "cloud" nor they want to be in the business of manufacturing, selling, and supporting mainframes. Do they want to expand their footprint in the Enterprise market? Of course. But this isn't 1989 and mainframes are not synonymous with Enterprise. This kind of thinking is exactly what's wrong with IBM.

For the folks who say IBM Cloud is over hyped and under whelming, I cannot argue. BUT remember IBM defines its cloud offering far different than anyone else. They do that so cloud revenue looks bigger (Eg 23% of revenue). How does IBM define cloud. It’s mostly “mainframe and everything that feeds mainframe”. So if you are google, or Apple, or “fill in name here” and you are trying to become bigger at a very very accelerated rate. Do you buy the market share, or do you capture the market share. There are several cloud companies seeing amazon and Microsoft pulling away from them, so they will make the business decision to buy the share vs competing for the share. Remember the way IBM defines cloud is different, thus their monopoly definition works in their favor. It’s dressing the old girl up, via preserving the install base, and not really trying to compete for share Vs the giants. Who would take a run at it? Just pay attention to who wants to be in third place growing to second place in the cloud wars.

What a great discussion in this thread - thanks guys

@1mdq I support your agenda but you excessively posting in every thread and it's counterproductive.

If you read the TOS in the footer, there is a bullet on 'excessive posting' - i think you are at riks of being blocked (mods also nuke all messages of folks who break rules).

I second the comment that no one would take IBM Cloud. My goodness - what a bunch of smoke and mirrors that contraption is. Everyone in the market knows this.

For the GTS/GBS - same as others have said- only people buying this stuff now are the Indian sweatshops. You won't last long there if you don't fit into that mold.

No way would Oracle touch the Power side in a million years. They got burned on their Sun buy a decade ago and have not barely finished writing down and k–ling off all the parts of that business (less the Exadata related stuff). SAP has never dabbled in their own hardware or OS areas - they have huge partnerships now with the big 3 clouds (AWS, Google, Azure). Why on earth would they decide to spend on last century's technology to roll all that back?

Google possibly has some minor interest in Power, but how much they would need a bunch of legacy IBM'ers to help them keep that little sliver of an offering in GCP, is anyone's guess. I'd guess they will let it die, as it would anyway under IBM.

Storage is a HUGE loser. No one is buying that stuff in mass anymore. Look at what happened to EMC, Netapp, etc. Putting SANs and NAS in your datacenter right now is so pre-Cloud. Only stodgy old enterprises who are way behind the curve would be doing any of that on a large scale now.

All the other fluff businesses that IBM is in - AI, Watson, etc are just vapor. They all are failed or failing. Way behind the competition.

Sorry to sound so negative, but I really see IBM as a failed company in a bunch of really tough markets. I mean, how many good stories do you hear about HP these days? IBM is a few years behind them. A storied name from yesteryear for sure. But, talk about a company whose time has passed - they are new poster child.

Mainframe and i business are still cash cows. RH is a good business. After years of negligence, under-investment, and arbitrary layoffs, there are no "diamonds" any more. Service businesses can go to these India consulting firms (most of people are there anyway). RH can be on their own again or acquired by google. The mainframe and i business is lucrative to anybody (Dell?) The rest is just garbage (the non-existent "Cloud business" is nowhere competitive. There was an article citing the market share of Power is 1%, who wants to buy it? )

It would have to be multiple acquirers. No one wants to buy IBM as a whole.

• One of the Indian body shops for GTS/GBS.
• Probably a dozen tech companies that would potential be interested in Power.
• Piecemeal off all the non-core software they've acquired over the years. Lots of diamonds in the rough that are being ignored by IBM.
• Nobody will take IBM Cloud.

What's left is Z, Storage, core OS/DB/Middleware software, and services that support these things. A much smaller, leaner, more profitable IBM, but unfortunately there's not much long term growth there. Which is why this spinoff fantasy will never happen. If anything, IBM will revert back to acquiring other companies to replace their continually declining organic revenue base.

There could be several of these folks involved. It’s kinda like IBM is breaking itself apart already.

1. Considering what happened at Austin and Power. I could easily see IBM spinning Power off. As you said SAP and Oracle would most likely take a run. Throw in storage (commodity) and they could be well served. Throw in TSS for Power/Storage, and you have an established marketplace ripe for harvesting or using that marketplace for swap out. Would Oracle Or SAP love to take a run at the Infor install base?

2. Given IBM’s focus on Enterprise/cloud (mainframe) and their Fortune 1200 strategy, any company looking to expand their non-enterprise consulting (GBS) would definitely benefit

3. Again given IBM’s focus on Enterprise/cloud strategy, any service offered by IBM (GTS) outside of Enterprise/cloud would be ripe for the picking. Most of this crew at IBM resides offshore now, so I would look for a body shop to acquire this part of IBM

4. Finally if IBM got 1, 2, and 3 from above done, Any of the FANG or even Microsoft would most likely take a look at the slimmed down IBM as it would be efficient and focused on Enterprise/cloud (mainframe) where none of them play