https://siliconangle.com/2021/02/07/big-4-cloud-providers-revenue-poised-surpass-115b-year/
Let's see what they have to say about IBM:
‘Oracle and IBM have clouds too’
We hear this frequently and so we’ve put Oracle Corp. and IBM Corp. on the chart. You can see they both have a respectable presence in the data set with 132 and 81 response, respectively. Oracle has a positive Net Score of 16.7% and IBM a negative 6.2%.
What does that mean? It says that among the 132 survey respondents using Oracle Cloud, 16.7% more customers are spending more on Oracle’s cloud than are spending less. In the case of IBM, it says more customers are spending less than spending more. Even though Oracle’s numbers are positive, both companies are in the “red zone” and show far less momentum than the leaders.
We’ve said many times that the good news is that Oracle and IBM at least have clouds. But they are not direct competitors of the Big 4 as hyperscale cloud infrastructure players – they’re just not. They each have a large software business, IBM has a huge services presence (it’s the majority of IBM’s revenue) and they both can migrate customers to the cloud and market hybrid cloud services. Their definition of cloud is most certainly different than that of AWS – which is fine, but both companies use what we call a “kitchen sink” method of reporting their cloud business.
Oracle, for example, includes cloud and license support in its cloud numbers, often with revenue recognition at time of contract with a term that’s renewable, and it also includes on-premises fees for database and middleware. If you want to call that cloud, fine. IBM is just as bad, maybe worse, and includes so much legacy stuff in its cloud number to hide the ball that it’s just not worth trying to unpack for this post. We have previously tried and frankly it’s just not a good use of time.