IBM
Founded in 1911, IBM has been at the forefront of enterprise IT for more than a century. Today, it’s parlaying that unmatched experience into a cloud strategy that’s unique in the market. While IBM offers a broad range of cloud services in all 3 layers of the cloud, it also has a separate element to its cloud business that accounts for about 35% or 40% of its revenue. For this aspect of its business, IBM taps into its extensive history with all manner of legacy systems to help clients convert their legacy systems into cloud or cloud-compatible environments, using a combination of hardware, software and services. With the addition of Red Hat, IBM has also staked out a strong claim as one of the world’s top providers of hybrid-cloud solutions, which allow customers to have their on-premises systems, public clouds and private clouds interoperate seamlessly and be managed as a single architecture. IBM ranks #7 on the Cloud Wars Top 10.
IBM’s cloud services
IBM’s extensive array of cloud services includes compute, network, storage, security, databases, analytics, AI, integration, migration and more. In 2019, the company converted a massive amount of its software IP into Cloud Paks, containerized solutions that help clients move core business applications to the cloud rapidly and securely—again, tying IBM’s traditional strengths with innovative new solutions. Cloud Paks can reduce development time by up to 84% and operational expenses by up to 75%.
Why IBM has earned a spot in the Cloud Wars Top 10
While IBM’s cloud revenue is huge (with this past year’s acquisition of Red Hat, its 2019 cloud revenue was $21.2 billion, coming in behind only Microsoft and Amazon), the company had struggled to develop a clear business-value position in the increasingly crowded and competitive enterprise-cloud market. The Red Hat acquisition helped address that, and has sparked renewed growth in IBM Cloud revenue after several no-growth quarters.
