Tag: Big Blue

Biggish Blue splits

Posted on October 9, 2020 by - News

A not so mobile X86 PC​IBM has said it plans to split its business in half by spinning off its infrastructure services unit into a separate public company.

The big idea is to create two separate companies, each with its own strategic focus by the end of 2021.

IBM CEO Arvind Krishna said that “now is the right time to create two market-leading companies focused on what they do best”.

The new company will have greater agility to design, run and modernise the infrastructure of the world’s most important organisations, Krishna believes. Both companies will be on an improved growth trajectory with greater ability to partner and capture new opportunities – creating value for clients and shareholders, he said.

Big Blue announces a wave of channel changes

Posted on February 13, 2019 by - News

A not so mobile X86 PCIBM has been talking through its channel changes with the assorted throngs at Partnerworld.

IBM announced a raft of new storage incentives in April last year, which enabled partner sellers and systems engineers to earn up to $100,000 in stackable rebates. The incentives covered all-flash arrays, Spectrum software and IBM systems deals.

IBM makes gold for Alchemy API

Posted on March 4, 2015 by - News

IBM logoBig Blue said it has bought a company that specialises in creating scalable cognitive computing application program interface (API) services and deep learning technology.

IBM said it has bought the company because it is complementary to its own development of next generation cognitive computing apps.

The move brings 40,000 developers into its own Watson framework.

The Denver based company was founded in 2005 and its software processes billions of API calls per month, IBM said. It’s available in eight different languages – English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish.

IBM didn’t say how much it paid for AlchemyAPI but it will integrate the firm’s software into its own Watson offerings.

IBM sued for alleged securities fraud

Posted on March 3, 2015 by - News

IBM logoBig Blue has been sued by a shareholder who thinks the company committed securities fraud by failing to write down a money-losing semiconductor unit before agreeing to pay another company $1.5 billion to take that unit off its hands.

In October IBM’s said it would sell the unit to GlobalFoundries (GloFo) and take a related $4.7 billion pre-tax charge.

IBM also announced third-quarter results that day. Its share price fell nine percent over the next two trading days, wiping out more than $18 billion of market value.

According to the complaint, IBM inflated its stock price before selling the semiconductor unit by carrying the unit’s property, plant and equipment assets on its books at $2.4 billion, when it should have known the assets were worthless.

The shareholder moaned that potential bidders had been unwilling to pay much more than $1 billion for the entire unit, including intellectual property and personnel, suggesting that the hard assets had no or negative market value.

The shareholder in question is the City of Sterling Heights Police & Fire Retirement System in Michigan. It also named three IBM officials as defendants, including Chief Executive Virginia Rometty.

It seeks class-action status on behalf of shareholders.

“Defendants presented a misleading picture of IBM’s business and prospects,” the complaint said. “When the truth about the company was revealed to the market, the price of IBM common stock fell precipitously.”

IBM gives cash to top suits

Posted on February 2, 2015 by - News

44ce1d7353cc797d6d0ad093f04f32c7Big Blue might be seeing its profits drop down the loo, but that has not stopped it paying bonuses to its top suits.

IBM has brought back annual performance bonuses for its chief executive and her top lieutenants for 2014 despite falling profits and a tumbling stock price.

According to a regulatory filing, the outfit withheld annual bonuses in 2013 at the executives’ own request.  The company has had more than 11 quarters of falling profits and is still trying to lose staff.

The bonuses returned as a feature of IBM’s executive compensation for 2014, according to a document filed with securities regulators on Friday, despite the fact that IBM’s net profit from continuing operations fell 7 percent last year and its stock shed about 14 percent.

IBM CEO Virginia Rometty will get a $3.6 million annual incentive payout for 2014, according to the filing. Chief Financial Officer Martin Schroeter and three other executives or advisers were also listed as getting smaller annual incentive payouts.

Rometty will receive a base salary of $1.6 million for 2015. This is her first rise in pay from the $1.5 million she got each of the last three years after taking up the post of CEO at the beginning of 2012.

She will also get a target annual incentive award of $5 million for 2015 and a long-term stock grant worth $13.3 million, which would be payable in 2018, according to the filing.

IBM last year withdrew its long-term plan to hit $20 per share in operating earnings for 2015 as it failed to get the sort of focus on higher-margin businesses such as security software and cloud services.

IBM has been divesting underperforming businesses in an attempt to move into the new era of cloud computing, a struggle shared by other established technology leaders.

No bonuses for the lesser suits, but at least they are not being fired.

IBM opens UK services centre

Posted on January 30, 2015 by - News

IBM logoBig Blue said it will open a services centre for its clients that will generate 300 IT jobs.
The centre will be based in Leicester and will supply application development and maintenance, and test and system management services.
IBM is pushing services for the cloud, for big data analytics, and for mobile, social and security technologies.
As well as the full time jobs, IBM said it will also offer internships and apprenticeships at the centre.
IBM is inviting interested candidates to submit their CVs to recruitment-isc@uk.ibm.com
David Stokes, CEO of IBM UK and Ireland commented: “The investment in job creation aims to inspire the next generation workforce from local technical colleges and universities.”

 

IBM brings in the clouds

Posted on October 28, 2014 by - News

Pic Mike MageeBig Blue said it has released or is just about to release a slew of cloud and Big Data analytics to the IT party.

It said that Cognos Business Intelligence, SPSS predictive analytics and Watson Analytics will soon be available on its Cloud marketplace. Currently the Cognos offering is in beta, and won’t be ready for action until the first quarter of next year.  And SPSS Modeller won’t be available for another 30 days.

What’s the Cloud marketplace?  It’s one place you can go to, or in IBM speak it’s “the digital front door to cloud innovation”.

Big Blue said that 25 percent of new business analytic installations will be as subscriptions to cloud analytic or application services by next year.

IBM wants a slice of that lucrative cake.

The giant said that it has five answers to five common problems for businesses including understanding customers, understanding operations, security, compliance and data warehouse modernisation.

Big Blue slows down

Posted on October 21, 2014 by - News

sn_blu_mysIBM shocked the cocaine nose jobs of Wall Street by giving up its 2015 operating earnings target and moaning that it was suffering from a bad dose of weak client spending and a slumping software sector.

IBM shares fell nearly seven percent to a three year low, which must really hack off Warren Buffett whose Berkshire Hathaway owns seven percent of IBM shares. The decline shaved more than $13 billion off Big Blue’s market cap, which stood at $182 billion at the stock market close on Friday.

Ginni Rometty, IBM chairman, president and chief executive officer said that the result was disappointing and that the company saw a marked slowdown in September in client buying behavior, and our results also point to the unprecedented pace of change in our industry.

In a move to rid itself of one underperforming business, IBM also said on Monday it will hive off its loss-making semiconductor unit to contract chipmaker Globalfoundries.

“Some of these fundamental shifts in the industry are happening faster than we planned,” Rometty said on a call with analysts. “We are continuing to remix to higher value.”

To be fair, IBM is hardly the only technology company having a hard time keeping up. German software maker SAP cut its 2014 operating profit forecast on Monday, citing a faster-than-expected move to cloud-based software. Oracle has similar problems.

Revenue from the company’s cloud service unit, which allows businesses to access software and data remotely, grew more than 50 percent in the quarter, while mobile revenue doubled.

Still, they were not enough to offset weakness in servers and other hardware, as well as some software business lines.

IBM is spending $600 million for “workforce restructuring,” but did not specify how many employees would be cleaning out their desks.

IBM, which said it would announce a new operating earning per share target for 2015 in January, reported a 4 percent drop in third-quarter revenues as clients held back on spending in September.

Revenue fell to $22.4 billion in the quarter from $23.34 billion a year earlier. Wall Street expected $23.37 billion.

Net profit from continuing operations dropped to $3.46 billion, or $3.46 per share, from $4.14 billion, or $3.77 per share in the same quarter last year.

 

IBM claims cloud performance breakthrough

Posted on October 11, 2013 by - News

IBM logoBoffins at Big Blue said they’ve developed a way to manage network bandwidth inside a cloud.

That, IBM said, could lead to improvements in system performance, and make clouds more efficient and cheaper.

The invention allows to automatically choose the best way for people to access the cloud depending on the network bandwidth.

IBM suggests the method will suit online applications that are subject to peaks and troughs in demand for services.

Those might include online retailers, auction sites, search engines, news media sites, and crisis and disaster management applications.

Big Blue explains that in a cloud computing environment, each person is given access to a virtual machine which delivers host  OS and physical resources. Multiple VMs are assigned inside the cloud and if demands for resources dramatically fluctuate, apps will become clogged up. IBM says its method lets systems automatically and dynamically re-assign work based on networking bandwidth requirements and availability.