Gin and gone-ic: Rometty out as IBM CEO, cloud supremo Arvind Krishna takes over, Red Hat boss is president In a surprise announcement on Thursday, IBM named a new CEO, Arvind Krishna. Virginia "Ginni" Rometty, who has led the company since 2012, will step down on April 6 to serve as executive chairman of the board until her retirement at the end of the year. "Arvind is the right CEO for the next era at IBM," said Rometty in a …
But what about all the good work the board did with share buybacks to prop up that share price and limit the decline to only 26 per cent? Anyone? Please?
*tumbleweeds roll by*
Writing from direct experience here, IBM's "cloud business" is IBM sending IBM customers to Azure. They are re-branding old, functionally obsolete products as cloud. A complete fiction. The only truly intelligent business thing that is happening there is that they have turned shareholders into robots that think what is happening is OK, OK, OK, OK...
yep, mainfame is counted as "cloud" revenue now, redhat is counted as "cloud" revenue now, pretty much everything they used to sell, has now been re-classified as cloud or AI in some unconvincing ploy to make shareholders think they are growing those "strategic imperatives" buzz word that Ginni came up with.
Anyone remember Softlayer? Nothing but an entry in history books now. IBM couldn't sell cloud if their life depended on it!
As for Watson, even those suckers who bought into it, have realised now it was a sham.
Indian Bumbling Mumblings, your time on this planet is almost up! Good Riddance too!
Well, the RH guy might have a different take on cloud and kubernetes and OTHER such things, using Red Hat solutions [let's say] for PRIVATE cloudiness.
My personal opinion: public clouds are subject to many problems, like widespread outages. A private cloud with a public fallback seems a LOT more reasonable to me, and would likely be more cost-effective as well. hard drives are cheap, hardWARE is cheap [for that matter[, and running Linux gives them ALL of the advantages.
THAT is the kind of cloud solution that IBM could focus on, and I bet it would work. Outsource to Azure? Not so much, really.
Good! Now maybe IBM can remember it is a hardware company that really hates to spend money on software, hence all the offshoring to cheap places of the world.
played a significant role in developing our key technologies such as artificial intelligence, cloud, quantum computing and blockchain.
Oh. Never mind then.
"Good! Now maybe IBM can remember it is a hardware company that really hates to spend money on software, hence all the offshoring to cheap places of the world."
LOL...IBM is a financial services company and has been for the best part of 30 years. Hardware and software are hard so it leases equipment and uses outsourcing to strip customers of the knowledge to use non-IBM solutions.
Actually IBM bungled OS/2 and PS/2, by tying them too closely together.
Nobody wanted to shell out $3k for a computer just to run OS/2, no matter HOW good it was. The PS/2's hardware was proprietary, on top of that. 386 and then 486 clones destroyed the PS/2 by dominating its market, and the OS/2 connection along with it. And Windows 3 (which was ALSO 3D Skeuomorphic like OS/2 1.2, unlike previous versions of both) rapidly outsold OS/2 and made GUI desktops "the norm", NOT requring a PS/2.
THAT is where IBM blew it. They've never really recovered...
Have to agree with bob here regarding the PS/2, or more specifically the MCA. Trying to use it to kill the clone market was a bad move. IBM eventually clawed back some of the PC market with Thinkpads and its PCI-bus server offerings but never came close to recovering its former position, and MCA turned out to be just an expensive adventure.
However, even in the PS/2 era IBM had a lot going for it, with three strong non-PC system families (RS/6000, AS/400, and ES/9000) and a research organization that was still among the best in the world. The rise of Linux, and to some extent Windows Server, gutted all the private UNIXes, but POWER (these days the p line) survived better than most. AS/400-then-i has been a cash cow for decades; it was just the right incremental evolution of S/38 to keep that market, and the move in CPU architectures was handled smoothly.
And while It's impossible to completely stem the tide of 370-family (ES/9000 through today's z) defectors to Windows and Linux (something I have personally contributed to, so this is of interest to me), IBM has worked hard at updating mainframe hardware and software with improved performance and new features to keep many of those customers coming back. They're very good at finding out what will convince people to renew those leases, whether it's building REST web service support into CICS or adding "pervasive encryption" to zOS.
I agree with the poster above that what's really hurt IBM is the short-term thinking of the past couple of decades, with massive "returns of value" to shareholders backed by ruthless cost-cutting and deskilling.
@Bob
They blew it similarly in the mainframe market. Overcharging license costs, slow and underfunded software capabilities and OS expansion. Products like CICS, TPF, even MQ are milked for all their worth. They are sadly end of life. There may be some twitching, but alternatives exist and if, as an enterprise, you have to re-engineer to reduce cost, you might as well re-engineer onto a different platform.
how is this sexist? Both of those CEOs (Meg, Carly) didn't do a very good job. Both also became politicians, and didn't do THAT very well, either.
However, I *might* consider that they were hired to make the "diversity" crowd happy... so when you 'cater to the left', you reap the 'rewards'! For good or ill. In these cases (apparently), 'ill'.
Rometti dropped big bucks to bring in Red Hat, whose cloud products are actually selling. Now Whitehurst is named company president. They probably couldn't hand him the reins so soon after the acquisition without the old-timers' shorts getting bunched, but they're clearly marking him as the next chief exec near-term.
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Which came first? Did they know of Krishna and wanted to find out more about how he runs a company or did they buy Red Hat then found a replacement for the CEO? Was buying Red Hat part of the hiring negotiation? "If you want me, you have to buy Red Hat." or was the purchase of Red Hat completely and separately done from the hiring of a new ceo?
I've been away from mainframes for about three decades so sorry if this question is not good. But does IBM actually design and manufacture its own hardware or is IBM mainly a software / services company?
The substance of what they sell is primarily high margin service promises and stagnant stock value.
Products such as hardware based ones, used to be a priority, but the their profitability haven't been profitable enough to justify the stock expectations. They've maintained a growth model of self-consumption until they find something with better margins to sell.
Today the growth model has consumed Ginny. Arvind now gets the privilege of attempting better.
@Do Not Fold Spindle Mutilate
But does IBM actually design and manufacture its own hardware or is IBM mainly a software / services company?
May I refer the honourable gentleman to the passage quoted earlier:
our key technologies such as artificial intelligence, cloud, quantum computing and blockchain.
Does that answer your question?
Shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic does not solve the problem. The Morons only have a couple of relevant products among the sewage. Probably their best product is Red Hat.
Ginnie was a worthless leader with no clue (see stock price performance) and I have my doubts about the new dismal leader as he looks to be an internal hire not an outsider who might be competent.
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