My impression is that they have almost fully divested from hardware and are doing whatever they can to boost their consulting, services, cloud & analytics businesses - hence this latest acquisition, on top of many other cloud purchases.
This is smart, given that hardware is a commodity with low and falling margins, whereas it's very hard to price heterogeneous services such as consulting, integration, etc. They've done some shady things to cut costs, but they needed to pivot pretty drastically in order to maintain their position and restart a growth cycle.
Ultimately, I think the "big data" market is overhyped, and that IBM is playing into this hype. People are gobbling up data storage and analytics services left and right, but are the valuations equivalent to the value added to a company by storing and sorting a ton of (potentially useless) data?
This is smart, given that hardware is a commodity with low and falling margins, whereas it's very hard to price heterogeneous services such as consulting, integration, etc. They've done some shady things to cut costs, but they needed to pivot pretty drastically in order to maintain their position and restart a growth cycle.
Ultimately, I think the "big data" market is overhyped, and that IBM is playing into this hype. People are gobbling up data storage and analytics services left and right, but are the valuations equivalent to the value added to a company by storing and sorting a ton of (potentially useless) data?