IBM has over 100 year's history and it faced many tough challenges along the way but every time it came back successfully. This time its revenue dropped 6 quarters consecutively, with the popularity of cloud computing and big data, IBM seems lag behind and is heavily hit by the storm. Its current technologies are only suitable for serving traditional companies 15 years ago but not companies now. Can IBM go though this challenge and come back again?
It seems IBM doesn't want to be left out. There are some big movements recently wchih indicate IBM is taking its biggest transformation since early 90's.
In just a few days ago, IBM announced its acuisition of Aspera, a company focus on high speed file transfer. This will enhance IBM's capability of improving it cloud computing performance. Also IBM has thousands of talented cloud computing experts, they can come out new algorithms and technologies easily with the support of finance and resource from IBM. More importantly, cloud computing is still in its early stage, there is still enough space for IBM to stretch its leg.
Later early in January 2013, IBM announced its public openning of Watson, a cognitive system which helps solving the world's toughest problems in the world such as healthcare. In its website, IBM described Watson as :
Watson may transform how organizations think, act, and operate in the future. Learning through interactions, they deliver evidence based responses driving better outcomes.
Not finish yet, IBM just sold its less profitable x86 server division to Lenovo with $2.3 billion. This sale is another deal after the ThinkPad sale 10 years ago. By selling this, IBM can focus on its Power series which is a competitor to the x86 series. From this deal, we can also find IBM is moving further away from hardware business and starts to focus on emerging technologies such as cloud computing, big data etc.
IBM is always thinking about keeping its growth and adapting to the fast moving and changing world. With its glorious history and technology storage, we have no doubt for its future. IBM will definitely come back like what it did 20 years ago and give us a shout.