Is there anyone else who thinks this should have happened a long time ago? How useful are they at all? Any thoughts? I absolutely agree with the person who said that IBM will need to be very resourceful if it wants to get rid of Power and Storage, because it will not be easy to sell them.
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It might be time to put power core instruction set processing capability inside the Z mainframe and leverage that in the cloud. Otherwise Power may end up being emulated on an Intel Xeon like Unisys does for the legacy architectures of the past.. Many legacy RISC architectures Sparc, PA–RISC, Itanium , DEC Alpha are all emulated. Innovate or emulate!
This quarter proved again that mainframe software brings in the revenue when no one else does. Would IBM dump the hardware portion onto a company they cannot control, when that hardware is so important to them?
Coming from Systems I can submit that there were huge Power RAs last year in the spring, and will likely again shortly. My opinion is that anything attached to Z (ds8900 eg) will survive but everything else... Gone.
If someone would be ever interested in Power, IBM would have sold it already. Power is a big problem to IBM, hard to sell, hard to cease producing it,
And is IBM really running Storage and Power with a skeleton crew? I haven't seen/heard of any layoffs in the tape/disk/flash space – sales or technical
I think you have it backwards Pure will buy IBM storage for the market share
IBM will acquire Pure Storage
Sale it while they have any value at all.
IBM wants out of the HW business. That is not to say the SW business. IBM views the sale, manufacturing, marketing, or design of HW as a waste of resources. Essentially they view HW as a commodity that benefits folks involved in low margin high volume businesses (kinda like PC’s ehhh). Will IBM exit Z or high end storage (DS–8900) Perhaps not, as they are niche high margins pieces of the business. IBM has already shown their hand, as Power and storage have just a skeleton crew left. If Redhat is truly HW agnostic, then IBM throwing money at storage and Power (especially scale out) is just throwing money out the window. I expect IBM to quite soon exit the business as it doesn’t fit the Hybrid Cloud marketplace. The deal will be based on terms more than price
In recent years they acquired Texas Memory, Storwize and CleverSafe. Who would they acquire next to help them get out of this hole they have been digging for 10 years, and would it be money spent wisely? Only 8 profitable quarters in the last 9 years. C'mon man.
There are a few valuable parts of the software, which could easily be shuffled over to Cloud & Cognitive (some of them already report externally there). But the hardware is on a long, slow glide to irrelevance.
Who in the right mind would buy them? They are declining business, which haven't seen any investments for years. The product lines are outdated, the technical talents are long gone, the market shares are abysmal (there was a report a few years ago that the Power had less than 1% of the market share). Look at past track record: x86, sold to lenovo (chinese), semi manufacturing sold to Abu Dhabi, lotus notes sold to HCL (India). Now you can see the problem.
I believe storage is about to make an acquisition, so storage is not going anywhere.