Howard Boville used to be CTO at Bank of America. He sat down to talk about his new role running “specialist vehicle” IBM Cloud.

“Gartner is a fascinating organisation, it’s paid-for advertising, by all the companies that play into
it”, Boville muses pointedly. “And within their Magic Quadrant, if you go to category king, they
take the category king — which is AWS — they list all the features they’ve got and they compare
you against that category king. We’re not a general purpose cloud, we’re focused on hybrid
cloud. That’s what I believed in, in my entire time at Bank of America; as do my friends and
peers in other institutions. Gartner don’t even recognise the term hybrid, I don’t know how they
feel they can not recognise that term, when the people that spend money on IT do.

Wait: doesn't Big Bleu tout Gartner analyses all the time? Heck, Ginni was even the keynote speaker at a Gartner Symposium in 2018, IIRC.

https://thestack.technology/ibm-cloud-howard-bovill/

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How did IBM go from the major player in running outsourced Data Centers to an insignificant niche player in Cloud Data Center services? Executive cowardice, incompetence and negligence is the only explanation.
This mistake of missing the industry transition to Cloud and the failure to build a strong, market share leading Cloud platform ranks as one of the bigger screwups in modern business history. It's the business equivalent of missing a one foot golf putt. IBM, by its very nature, was in position to be #1 or #2 in public cloud except for the inability of its Executive leadership over the past 10 years to execute a viable and timely cloud initiative.

This message is not new. A few years ago, the Cloud BU was in the middle of filling out the questionnaire to compete in the magic quadrant, but IBM cloud could not respond to most of the questions. It was so far behind and noncompetitive that the execs decided to say that Gartner was our foe and not playing with us. IBM wants Gartner to count old hosting services as Cloud, but Gartner says "no, that's no cloud".

IBM kept hiring Indians with an IT degree to do the GTM work. People with no business experience whatsoever to lead GTM. They didn't even have soft skills. The guy who still leads GTM was always bragging that he was friends with the VP for years. They keep it all in the family.

Time for IBM to grow up and stop arguing with the research organizations. Gartner makes or breaks your reputation in IT.

Cloud has all kinds of definitions That’s why it’s almost impossible to compare revenue between companies. IBM’s hybrid is Mainframe focused and thus claims 25 billion. Do any of you think IBM’s cloud is 25 billion? NOPE but when you are the only game in town (mainframe) you get to define it however you want. Amazon and Microsoft are certainly not playing in that marketplace, but rather in an on prem Intel focus for their hybrid definition. Two completely different animals.

Amazon has hybrid cloud, as does Microsoft. I suspect that their hybrid department may be much larger than IBM's.

a real IBM hybrid cloud customer reference.. how many more are there?

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Howard Boville used to be CTO at Bank of America. He sat down to talk about his new role running “specialist vehicle” IBM Cloud.

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