There is a very good chance Storage and Power (non-enterprise) will go next. Not because of the sale price, but because of the people cost reduction (approx 10-12k if you include TSS and associated cloud), and sharing of investment needed to continue those product lines.
What are the chances that this person is correct in their predictions?
"EMR You forgot to include the modernization portion in your description. IBM will be a SW modernization "
Wait - wasn't this UNISYS a zillion years ago?
The only thing keeping the fu---d up management and company alive has been profitable differentiable products. Oh right "Hybrid Cloud on Z with disk arrays".
IBM will keep their named accounts (approx 1500 accounts worldwide) and the marketing teams that service them. IBM will keep the mainframe, high end power, and high end storage along with their supporting cloud and TSS services. Everything else will go. Why? No profit for the investment needed, and those customers don’t fit into the new Redhat strategy. They don’t employ IBM consultants or SW modernization. Wave goodbye as IBM has already started the process.
"Systems" was thoroughly gutted in re-deployment. My former project now in "Storage".
Some of the HW is super nice - but super expensive. Z, disk arrays, etc. And not many products "locking" customers on Z.
Offhand they're only keeping them due to reputation on very high end/non stop applications (which Z et al excell at).
This article (see below) is very interesting in that Kyndryl has down sized USA on shore head count to 8%. That’s aggressive given 45% of their revenue comes from NA. Given that Consulting and Infrastructure within IBM are mostly structured around services offerings now, could IBM be aiming for comparable numbers? Our survey says most likely. Couple this with Meta’s second round of announced layoffs yesterday, and you can see where industry is heading (Efficiency (layoffs) to lower costs along with offshoring to achieve a lower burden rate) Can anyone out there say IBM is a lean, mean efficient machine? I didn’t think so. You can guess the rest
https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/24/kyndryl_ibm_layoffs/
EMR You forgot to include the modernization portion in your description. IBM will be a SW modernization / hybrid cloud company along with all the consulting and supporting services. Yes it’s a NICHE, but it a very very profitable NICHE if IBM can get its total costs under control
Setting aside the details for a moment, an easy way to judge these predictions is to remember that IBM will ditch lines of business as soon as they commoditize. When IBM cannot add significant value to an offering when compared to competitors in the market, then look for that LOB to go.
That said, IBM has a curious thing with market positioning. What markets is IBM competing in? Let's say for the sake of argument that Storage and Non-Enterprise Power goes away. They don't do networking anymore. IBM ends up being a software company who will sell big proprietary servers to their largest customers, and software and cloud services to everyone else?
When IBM sold microelectronics to Global Foundries, the chip sets prices used in the power boxes more than doubled overnight. IBM thought the deal was good as they didn’t have to absorb the burden costs (people, manufacturing, or processing equipment). Yes they still shared development, and design costs, but that could be absorbed. The burden costs had been shed, and IBM bean counters were happy to pay burden costs on a per chip set price vs a fixed all in cost. Look for Power and storage to do the same thing