I read an interesting article on the future of IBM in the hybrid cloud world where the author questioned whether selling off the System x server business was a good idea. I would like to hear your thoughts.
Here is the article:
https://www.nextplatform.com/2020/10/20/at-its-heart-ibm-remains-a-systems-company/
IBM nuked Intel servers because someone convinced management that Linux on Power would replace the Intel install base How did that work out? IBM in May nuked almost everything Power related. Design, open power, LINUX, ISV workloads, and adaptor research. If power is not for sale, I would be shocked The question is who will buy it. It’s a niche marketplace with zero growth and only a replacement strategy. No Hyper scaler has adopted it, and it continues to lose 15-25% per year of install base. Sounds like a TV or appliance business model doesn’t it. Unless the Chinese go all in on Power, IBM will get very little for it. IBM should accept what they can get via the replacement model market, and structure the sale with an IP license model (much like open power) IBM should keep the legacy OS’s (AIX and OS/400) as they are very profitable due to their proprietary nature. Every quarter they wait, the value goes down
This is much better breakdown than the other article i read which said ibm should sell off systems division - not sure if that other person was just talking about power or whole systems.
I would agree that ibm should just k–l the power though at this point.