IBM Archive

IBM in late February launched BlueMix, a billion-dollar investment in a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud based on its recent empire-building acquisition of SoftLayer. A TBR analyst says IBM’s as-a-service moves are changing the company’s DNA. My opinion? It’s a lot more significant than that! If Big Blue can integrate all its services in a true

You can bet IBM Global Services doesn’t want any more earnings announcements like its Q4 2013 report.  Big Blue posted year-over-year revenue growth of only 4 percent instead of the 7 percent it indicated just three months ago and its 5 percent Q3 growth. Its margins are good, but clearly IBM has a growth

When Bobby Pinson recorded his country & western song “Don’t Ask Me How I Know” dispensing bits of wisdom, I’m sure he didn’t realize he was providing advice to service providers. But my favorite line in the song is also great advice for today’s BPO providers — “Sell your truck while it’s still running.”

So you’re in an outsourcing relationship and so far you’ve achieved impressive results in meeting your objectives. Then you wake up one day to the unwelcome news that your service provider sold that line of business to another company and you’re now relegated to a provider you didn’t select. What should you do? Do

IBM is consistently more profitable than its peers in the global services market. Why are they succeeding and staying out in front of competitors? If you take a deep look at IBM’s impressive record of profit and growth, the reason behind its success becomes apparent: IBM has a clear strategic intent and makes hard

In the worlds of sports and business, there are many examples of teams coming from behind and winning big. Oracle Team USA’s exciting win over Team New Zealand in the 2013 America’s Cup yacht races last week is certainly a big one. There’s also a race happening among the global services providers in the

Accenture has beautifully moved into the number-one spot among transformational service providers. They snatched it from IBM, their biggest competitor for that spot. How did they do it? Accenture created a significant gap between itself and IBM in two game-changing aspects: customer access and talent. Accenture gained a leg up on IBM in customer

The cloud services space just got a lot more interesting. Announced earlier this month, IBM paid a hefty price — $2 billion — to buy Dallas, Texas-based SoftLayer Technologies, the world’s largest privately held cloud computing infrastructure provider. IBM is now well on the way to delivering on the goal stated in its 2012

One of my partners recently returned from a conference remarking that he could randomly put any service provider’s logo on any of the collateral being distributed and nobody would notice.  Everyone’s message was essentially the same as their competitors. It is difficult to differentiate among the Indian heritage providers. Or at least it has