International Business Machines Corp is splitting itself into two public companies, capping a years-long effort by the world’s first big computing firm to diversify away from its legacy businesses to focus on high-margin cloud computing.
IBM will list its IT infrastructure services unit, which provides technical support for 4,600 clients in 115 countries and has a backlog of $60 billion, as a separate company with a new name by the end of 2021.
The new company will have 90,000 employees and its leadership structure will be decided in a few months, Chief Financial Officer James Kavanaugh told Reuters.
I have no idea what to say about this. IBM is so far out of my comfort zone these days.
What could this mean for red hat?
Probably very little is my best guess. Regardless of which side it ends up on, the reasons for owning a linux/linux services company stay the same. It’s possible that Red Hat might be split in two as well, with the OS side going to the computing company, and the services side going to the new. I suppose we will have to wait till next year to find out
A relatively bigger role as part of of smaller company ?
The Next Platform has a better article on the subject. https://www.nextplatform.com/2020/10/08/ibm-jettisons-legacy-services-to-focus-on-hybrid-cloud/
I’ve been waiting patiently for the old IBM business blog itjungle.com to post their take(s) on this, but contributor Timothy Prickett Morgan decided to take his story to nextplatform.com instead. Media politics?
It’s a big cultural shift for IBM away from the sales-oriented mindset, where big system sales typically resulted in lucrative follow-on engagements for Global Services or whatever they’re called these days. The hardware business and on-premises system software businesses are slowly drying up. Meanwhile top salesmen aren’t the stars at the Big 5 Internet companies, although they probably still are at Oracle.
As Scott McNealy used to crack at the Sun conferences, “No IBM Global Services needed.”
In college they replaced the aging vax with an IBM AIX server of some sort.
They bought the machine.
They bought the licenses for the software they wanted to run on it
They neglected to pay for the software to be loaded on the machine,
And for some reason it had to be IBM that installed it. So the vax lived on for another 6 months while they negotiated an installation service.
They’re relatively newcomers (or very new for that matter if you compare it to AWS), but they do seem to be making all the right moves, as long as they keep giving their customers options and flexibility.
I’d rather use Azure personally, or a smaller local cloud provider for smaller clients, but if they’re price competitive and available in your area, I don’t see why not, provided you can always plan to migrate clouds in case anything happens to them.
What kind of architecture do you have where you can migrate clouds easily?