[News] IBM doing a little better than expected

[StyM]

http://www.fudzilla.com/news/41871-i...-than-expected

The ever shrinking Biggish Blue posted better-than-expected third-quarter revenue thanks to its moves to the cloud and analytics businesses.

Since Ginni Rometty took over IBM, the outfit has attempted to shift toward more profitable areas, such as cloud services, artificial intelligence, analytics, and security. Meanwhile it has killed off its traditional hardware and services businesses.

Revenue from those areas, which the company calls "strategic imperatives," rose 16 percent to $8 billion in the third quarter. Cloud revenue jumped 44 percent compared with a 30 percent rise in the second quarter, it said.

Curiously though, shareholders were not that impressed and were more concerned about the fact the company had reported its 18th straight quarter of declining revenue. Shares were down 3.1 percent at $150.60 in after-market trading.

IBM has made a string of acquisitions focused on elements of its strategic imperatives business, including The Weather Company and Truven Health, spending $5.45 billion so far this year. IBM spent $821 million on acquisitions in the same period last year.

IBM's operating gross margin fell 2.1 percentage points to 48 percent in the quarter, as a result of higher investments in the company's cloud business and the shift to a subscription-based as-a-service model.

The company's revenue marginally fell to $19.23 billion in the quarter ended 30 September from $19.28 billion a year earlier, but beat the average analyst estimate of $19 billion. Net income fell to $2.85 billion from $2.95 billion.

[NEOAethyr]

This I think is where it's at:
https://www.olcf.ornl.gov/summit/

It may or may not make them money lol, but it's still awesome.
I did some reading last night I a believe it's a shame that apple went intel now, it's the only company I know of that were putting out power configs.
What I'm thinking is, you could go power9, but in the end, you would be stuck without much software.
Stuff would have to be re-written and ported over so it could compile correctly.
I don't know what they have for virtualization instructions.

I'de like to go ibm myself, it would be nice to see another competitor on the market.
Here's a board supposedly coming out for the old platform:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...os-Crowdsupply
Bad design though and old platform, and cost lol...

[drmrlordx]

Considering that Apple chose to build off FreeBSD for OSX and essentially retooled their entire software ecosystem, they could have chosen POWER again had they wished. At the time, Intel just flat-out had better products for Apple's intended purposes.

Even today it's not clear how well a 1P POWER9 system would work for a desktop or workstation.

[zalbard]

Even today it's not clear how well a 1P POWER9 system would work for a desktop or workstation.

Or a laptop... And Apple sells a lot more of those.

[drmrlordx]

Yup. POWER is awesome for SAP and the like, but I'm not sure how it would scale down to smaller systems. I'd still like to see a PC or console-like device based off of 1P POWER9 on an OpenPOWER platform featuring some kind of GPU connected by CAPI, but that's probably never going to happen, especially considering how much juice would be pulled in by something like that!