So do IBM's storage announcements give us a glimmer of hope to take business away from the competition, or is this just lipstick on a pig? Lower pricing, but is margin improving, and what about legacy storage?
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Look for all HW except flash to be sold. Why. IBM is defining itself as a cloud company. If 85% of your revenue will be delivered as PaaS, do you really want to make it or even market it? Nope, it’s cheaper to just sell the division, to whoever wants it, and write a 10 year global foundry contract to guarantee you will buy your old equipment for cloud. Remember most of the storage SW is already reported up thru Cognitive So your question is why is flash remaining? IBM labs spend a pile of money on flash, and IBM will retain flash and make their revenue via the IP rights
According to IDC, in 2018 IBM was #5 in the enterprise flash market behind Dell, NetApp, HPE and Hitachi.
IBM consigned their storage hardware division to the lower ranks when they RA'd their best storage reps years ago, only to find that EMC were more than willing to take them on and carry away their respective clients. It doesn't really matter what IBM do now, they've fatally lost their market share and clients are unlikely to displace incumbent vendor kit and re-skill their IT team unless there's a compelling case for doing so.
IBM Storage has 3 parts
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SW defined storage is doing quite well and has high profit
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Flash is competitive but has high margins and IBM is seen are a segment leader
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Everything else (think any other storage device besides flash, that is manufactured in a plant). This is where IBM cannot compete and is considered quite weak. There are too many other offerings, folks willing to invest in reps/relationships, and low cost manufacturers to compete against. IBM’s overhead for just a bunch of disk is uncompetitive and customers know this.