IBM’s Greatest Challenge?

The end game is Cloud

IBM has survived for over 100 years (in fact over 110 years). As many companies have risen and fallen in each of the key eras of technology, IBM has sustained its lead. Who remembers that Plessey, Fairchild, RCA, Rockwell, Burroughs, DEC, and Sperry, all were leaders in technology at one time? In the 1970s, IBM was in the Top 5 companies in the world, and they sustained their Top 10 position until the end of the millennium. By 2020, the top companies in the world are now commonly tech companies (Amazon, Google, Facebook, AT&T and Intel) and where IBM slipped to 38th place in the Fortune 500, and is now down to 65th place in 2023:

IBM has managed to innovate around mainframes and then onto the PC, but now they know the future … the Cloud. For them, most other things … things related to services, software and systems running on-premise are now seen as a legacy. With the ever-increasing rise of the public cloud, IBM sees the threats of Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure, as some of the most significant threats that it has ever seen to its core business … looking after its customers.