IBM reports growing interest in multicloud

IBM has reported revenues of $21.8bn for the fourth quarter of 2018, a 3% decline from the same quarter in 2017.

Revenue in its Cognitive Solutions business, which includes software and transaction processing software, was flat at $5.5bn. Revenue from its Global Business Services division, which includes consulting, application management and global process services, increased by 4% to $4.3bn. Revenue in its Technology Services and Cloud Platforms business, which includes infrastructure services, technical support services and integration software, declined by 3% to $8.9bn.

For the full year, IBM reported revenues of $79.6bn, up 1% from 2017.

The company claimed it was seeing increased demand in hybrid cloud. “Major clients worldwide are turning to the IBM Cloud and our unmatched industry expertise to transform their businesses and drive innovation,” said Ginni Rometty, IBM’s chairman, president and chief executive officer.

The $34bn acquisition of Red Hat will not be completed until the second half of 2019, but in a transcript of the earnings call posted on the Seeking Alpha financial blogging site, the company’s chief financial officer, Jim Kavanaugh, said IBM customers were moving more critical workloads to the cloud.

“We see cloud still resonating with our clients. With Red Hat and IBM together, we see this movement of how we can deliver value. Ginni calls this chapter two, where clients are moving very business-critical business workloads [to the cloud], and that’s about 80% of the workloads ahead of us.”

Kavanaugh said the value of bringing IBM and Red Hat together was centred around hybrid open multicloud, to deliver what he claimed was a differentiated value proposition.

One of the customer wins mentioned in the earnings call was BNP Paribas. “BNP Paribas has selected IBM to strengthen its cloud environment, with a hybrid multicloud approach, bringing together the IBM Cloud and private clouds, along with existing infrastructure,” said Kavanaugh.