It doesn’t seem to be able to take flight IBM. The multinational, led by Arvind Krishna, has presented results this week and they have not been exactly to write home about. The company has generated a revenue of 15,500 million euros, which represent a drop of 0.4% compared to the previous year. The good news? The acquisition of Red Hat is confirmed as one of the best decisions the company has made in the last decade, since the open-source software giant continues to be one of the few divisions that pulls the bandwagon.
On the negative side we find that IBM’s infrastructure business is in low hours, with a drop in revenue of 14.6%, up to 3.6 billion dollars, compared to the data of the previous year.
That overall loss includes IBM Z Systems, the company’s mainframe business, which is down 30% on its own. Z Systems has been pretty strong for the company in the past, so it’s not entirely clear if the mainframe business is on its last legs or if IBM is failing to monetize computers that remain vital to companies. operations of, for example, a large number of financial entities.
As we pointed out, it is in the area of software where IBM scores. Here revenue increased 7.2% to $6.6 billion, with Red Hat leading the way. with an increase of 11%. It is worth asking what would become of the company if in 2018 it had not decided to invest those 34,000 million euros, taking into account that each quarter that passes most of the good news comes precisely from the good behavior of Red Hat.
IBM recently shelled out $4.6 billion to buy Apptio, a software company that helps people better understand where resources are allocated, whether on-premises or in the cloud. The deal is not expected to close until later this year, but it is clear that it could be a way to squeeze additional revenue from the hybrid cloud approach, and could add a revenue layer to the company’s future results that will bolster year-on-year comparisons in the future.
