Wall St moneymen on IBM Q4 financials: Don't get your hopes up

IBM revenues are expected to shrink for its Q4 of calendar '18 and into 2019 amid worries the mainframe refresh wave has crested and strategic bets still aren't yet big enough to offset declines in legacy tech. Ahead of IBM reporting financials tomorrow, influential Big Blue watcher Bernstein outlined headline projections: …

[Anonymous Coward]

"IBM revenues are expected to shrink for its Q4 of calendar '18 and into 2019 amid worries the mainframe refresh wave has crested and strategic bets still aren't yet big enough to offset declines in legacy tech."

No, no no....the mainframe refresh wave had nothing to do with IBM breaking their declining revenues duck. It was all Watson, cloud, AI and all the other sexy stuff you know you want!!! And soon there will be Red Hat too!!! IBM have changed...we're not *gasp* dying....

[2+2=5]

"IBM revenues are expected to shrink for its Q4 of calendar '18 and into 2019 amid worries the mainframe refresh wave has crested and strategic bets still aren't yet big enough to offset declines in legacy tech."

No, it's because Chinese consumers are not buying enough iPhones mainframes.

[TheVogon]

Htf does IBM sell 20 billion dollars of anything? Its such an archaic company. Just walking in an IBM workplace you feel like you just went 30 years into the past.

[trevorde]

Next step...

... more RA's

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Next step...

More?

Let's see, there's the usual quarterly RA's and the special Christmas "managers need to get their bonus" RA's.

Maybe a Valentine's RA to share the love?

[quite_remarkable]

Social, Cloud, Analytics and Mobile. Big Blue and it's acronyms eh ? Seems to me that the Strategic Imperatives have been found wanting, rather like the senior management.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sack Em

> Social, Cloud, Analytics and Mobile.

That's almost perfect, however IBM has them in a different order:

Social, Analytics, Cloud, Mobile = SAC'M → Sack 'em

[a_yank_lurker]

Wasting away

Itsy Bitsy Morons seem to have no real clue why they are floundering. Yes, they will have an occasional good quarter, law of averages says the stars will align favorably for them once in awhile. But they does not mean they have solved their problem, no really compelling products in most of their markets.

[2Blockchainz]

The Ginni coefficient:. A stastical measure of the number highly-skilled engineers you need on staff vs. Outsourced low-wage coders, needed to produce a minimally-viable product in the marketplace.

[Anonymous Coward]

Solution: even more off-shoring. And fire some old people.

Quick, shift even more employment to India. IBM's clients won't mind paying premium rates for the cheapest labor force that IBM can find.

I agree that IBM's only chance of recovery is innovation. But lack of innovation isn't how they ended up here. It was off-shoring the labor force to India to cut costs. Your real customers notice immediately, and their upper management eventually notices the problems. Eventually they extricate themselves from the IBM lock-in, and IBM won't get back in until the memory of the pain fades.

[ma1010]

And for the future, don't forget the lawsuits

Anyone silly enough to think of investing in IBM really should re-think that idea. Besides their "management without a clue, "if the age discrimination suits continue to gain traction and get class action certification, IBM could be in for some massive payouts to all the older people they screwed over in their quest to illegally shave the payroll through age discrimination. Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch, either.

[FozzyBear]

IBM notched more than 20 quarters of declining sales until it broke that duck in 2018. But even after a relatively positive run of form.

Sure it was not revenue rather than sales that reported the modest increase? Honest question.

If not, then the increase to the bottom line can be directly attributed to the 10,000's of workers they sacked over the year Not for any innovative product or system.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Sure it was not revenue rather than sales that reported the modest increase? Honest question."

It was genuine revenue - they released a mainframe refresh and got a nice revenue boost. Just like they'll get another revenue boost during the next refresh cycle in a few years...

The honest question should be "is IBM an actual player in 21st century IT or is it just a legacy system provider and place where old IT jobs go to die?"

[Mr Fix.]

IBM hah.

Currently fighting with some file restore in IBM Tivoli Storage Manager.

Looks to be based on Java.

When searching for a specific file, Java ran up memory usage to 3.5 GB without finding the file. Its a damn dir /s |find "blah"!

Now I've started a folder-restore, IBM Tivoli Storage Manager Scheduler Service client currently eating about 4.7 gig of Memory.

The GUI looks like it was made in the early 90s but about says Copyright IBM 2016.

The sooner they die the better.