Thread regarding IBM layoffs

"...and regulatory problems to overcome..."

Do the regulatory problems prohibit cloud?

Best guess is... the reason such a company would consider cloud is... to offload the regulatory risks to the cloud provider and be able to wash their hands of the issue, so to speak... "But Mr. Regulator... we hired IBM... the experts... to handle our Info Tech...it's not our fault...we paid for the best..." and such...

In a word, no. I work for IBM in services, and when we practitioners talk amongst ourselves the discussion is usually that almost all of our clients are either all on prem, or their key stuff is all on prem and they are kicking the tires on non-strategic work and POCs on cloud.
A big part of the challenge is the vast majority of IBM's major clients are in highly regulated industries (financial, insurance, telco, health care, government), and also already have significant data center investments (equipment and staff). So, there is both an institutional resistance to change and regulatory problems to overcome.
I wouldn't say IBM is unique in this regard, but it is true for a larger part of our business than most of our competitors. Amazon and Google don't have this problem at all, and Microsoft has it to a far less degree. I don't have an answer, and have also watched IBM try several different approaches over the last several years with limited success. Perhaps leveraging RHEL, open source, and Open Shift will be different - but I'm skeptical that it will result in anything other than a short term RHEL bounce.

I always took the hybrid cloud emphasis and the lowest common denominator of containers as an admission that IBM failed as a real cloud vendor. If they had the range of services available that AWS, Azure and GCP have and the market share, they wouldn't be emphasizing the hybrid / multi cloud thing as much.

If you are a successful cloud vendor, you get the lock in with your higher level services - the kind of thing that IBM would love.

It depends on the customers you are willing to let go. Remember AK has already announced his intention to only play in the large enterprise accounts. IBM when they acquired RedHat mapped the largest 1100 accounts in the world, and continued on. The mapping was done with consultants, so there wasn’t near as much IBM internal bias to the mapping. Also remember AK is the father of Hybrid cloud via Redhat, so he is venturing out to where Ginni feared to go. I expect the mapping exposed the ugly side of the legacy strategy, and that is why IBM is restructuring away from it. Restructuring is never a pretty process, but it absolutely needs to be done. According to this website, IBM is plunging headlong into the restructuring much like Gerstner did when IBM needed to self correct. AK’s been at the new strategy, since April, so we should expect some hard results to be announced by 4th q earnings report (jan 20th or there abouts) In the end Hybrid cloud needs to show growth and quickly, or as you said IBM is toast

I think it is going to be tough for IBM and even tougher for their employees in 2021. A significant % of what is being reported as Hybrid Cloud revenue is in fact ‘legacy’ revenue which now simply falls under HCI. Additional the family silver is being sold of by allowing m/f customers to convert out of their MLC commitments for a one time payment a % of which shows up on the books as new HCI/Cloud revenue. They need to keep acquiring to show growth, it’s a house of cards.

NO

Good Luck AK You own it all now No excuses will be accepted

Your all screwed. Get out now.