https://www.crn.com/news/cloud/arvind-krishna-s-ibm-think-keynote-we-are-open-to-partnerships-
What a surprise... this is what happens when you don't dominate anything anymore IBM!!!
It is another sign that this iconic company is totally finished as a giant and leader in the Tech world.
I keep my two shinny objects between my knees and ankles.
This may be IBM’s epiphany Partnerships make far more sense vs chasing the next shinny object. Ginni had no plan and was enamored by shinny objects. Can you name a moon shot that panned out or drove IBM innovation over her 8 year or even Sam’s previous 8 years? AK by embracing partnerships has acknowledged IBM has to pick and choose where it wants to compete (spend money to drive competitive advantage and profit) and where it would rather not compete (spend Money on IP licenses to drive profit and market share). The recent Amazon partnership lays this out nicely. License the Amazon infrastructure (what amazon does best) while still allowing IBM to be the direct face to the enterprise customer and inking a profitable deal. “sometimes par is good enough to win” IBM will continue to compete in Enterprise, AI, Hybrid cloud, and Redhat solutions. Everything else will move to an IP licensing engagement where IBM will sign profitable enterprise deals, while licensing the IP necessary to retain the face to face engagements. If AK pulls this off, he’ll drive profits while shrinking IBM. (One of the essential goals of the CFO) Essentially validating the idea that IBM can’t be everything to everyone anymore. Let’s hope he can inspire the legacy management team to embrace his vision, as so far the pace of change has been glacial due to managements push back.
Arvind Krishna may well go over in history as the one who took IBM to the end of it's life. The former CEO - Ginni Rometty - in reality paved the road for him.
IBM has partnered with Amazon when it comes to cloud. There is more profit in being the marketer and not having to invest in the infrastructure.
There is only one boat these days that has importance - Cloud. And IBM, unfortunately, missed this boat badly.
Anybody remember the much ballyhooed Apple partnership?. We had all those photos of Ginny walking in a garden with Tim Cook. Emails were sent about it everyday for months. IBM created whole hierarchies of people within IBM dedicated to support the Apple partnership. And, what came out of it? Nothing except Apple got to sell a whole bunch of Macs, Iphones and Ipads for IBM employees but IBM didn't get any boost from Apple. According to Cringley, Apple had just 1 employee dedicated to IBM the whole time. That is how much they cared.
The point is that the only organically viable partnerships are where IBM is just re-selling the partner's products and services. The partners don't mind because they simply treat IBM as just another channel through which they can sell their own products. However, there are barely any partners who want to sell IBM's products and services in return. The only exception is small/medium hardware and storage resellers but even those partners have pivoted to competing clouds (and not IBM Cloud).
Heck, even IBM's own "internal" partners don't care. Red Hat has not helped IBM increase its non-Red-Hat revenue but is happy to let IBM'ers be forced into hawking Red Hat products (Ansible!). GBS/Consulting has been providing consulting, solutioning and app management services on competitor's products for a while. GTS left to become Kyndryl and promptly signed a deal with AWS/Azure to manage those clouds for their customers.
So, when this dude says "we are open to partnerships", he is just hoping IBM can make some money by being a glorified reseller.
Translated to..."We're open to buyouts....or.... We're for sale."