Big Blue weeps as another 8% slips off its storage scales

When is Big Blue's storage slide going to end? IBM's latest quarterly and full year fiscal 2014 results show an unabated fall in storage hardware revenues, with an eight per cent annual decline to $864m in the fourth quarter of 2014. It's a huge number, but back in fiscal 2011 the same quarter recorded $1.2bn in storage …

[Shoot Them Later]

Sod Big Blue's storage slide...

Those are terrible charts.

Just because Excel lets you add a 3D-at-an-angle effect, doesn't mean you should actually use it, if you want to get information across in a useful manner.

[Timmay]

Re: Sod Big Blue's storage slide...

I was about to say the same thing - using a 3D scale which goes up towards the right, means you can have declining values without it looking quite as bad as if it was flat!

Sneaky

[lsatenstein]

IBMs become too lean and too short term focused.

At one time, IBM was the company many IT experts desired to work for. Then the era of the laptop, 64bit computing, Unix / Linux appeared, and IBM found it's having difficulty selling big systems. That started the era of cut costs. Keep only marketing and a shrival of R&D people.

IBM pruned and pruned itself. It became an expensive hosting company, it slowed development of its main operating systems and new hardware. It became a consulting firm for projects in the ERP realm, and then, when that dried up, IBM dried up.

At one time we bought PCs, IBM typewriters, and IBM products. Today, iBM, as IBM is run, it is a has-been company, simply relying on its patents and some AIX stuff to sustain itself.

IBM's problem is that it's margins are too high to today's world. Innovation in IT is happening at a rate faster than IBM's ability to adapt.

What can IBM do? Look at futures and where they are going. Look at vehicle and home automation technology. Sell the data centers or lease them out to better management. Get into very high speed communications, particularly inter-machine. and machine-network.

Stop selling off assets that are critical for the future.

[Alistair]

IBM Storage slide

(pun intended)

Have you ever tried to manage an SVC?

If you have, you understand.

[luis river]

HP versus IBM

IBM doesn't possess advantage significant tech in its storage products, compared for example with Hewlett Packard and its systems 3Par with big characteristic and impressive quality /price, IBM doesn't have anything to do