IBM Scrambles To Stay In XaaS Race
CEO Ginny Rometty is finishing off another round of divesting commodity product lines, along with associated headcount, as IBM tries to remain in the forefront of high-margin IT product and service businesses. At or near the top of Rometty's forward agenda is cloud computing, starting with the expansion of the SoftLayer business IBM bought last year.Some investors like the story. But, as the folks at itjungle.com (a very underrated news site focusing on IBM and its competitors) point out, cloud computing might not turn into the sort of high margin business IBM is accustomed to, even with the enticement of Big Data analytics that IBM and others have been pushing.
Meanwhile, in contrast with generations past, many of the biggest consumers of IT are also among the biggest and innovative producers of platform technology: Google, Amazon, Facebook.
The risks are to data privacy and service lock-in, I suppose. It will be interesting to see which businesses and practices migrate towards or away from cloud computing going forward.
I wonder whether IBM will compete with offerings from Google, Amazon, and Apple, or attempt to differentiate its offerings for niche business categories. Any thoughts on niche business categories where cloud-computing services are not and, perhaps, will not be addressed by the big consumer-facing companies?