Shadow of the blue colossus
In the cult game Shadow of Colossus, the protagonist defeated a tremendous majestic colossus. Seeing one for the first time it is difficult to estimate what it will do in the next moment, where his weak spot is, and from which side you should get closer.
IBM is one of such colossuses in the IT world. It is well known for its cut-offs of discouraging or low-profit businesses, as well as unexpected acquisitions like Red Hat. And now IBM separates the part of the business, which seems to make a noticeable profit in contrast to the constant decrease in sales, and seems to be not very costly, for example, on R&D.
The separation of managed services business into a separate company is a logical and correct step for a variety of reasons, because of the following reasons: different company culture, competition on the managed services market, drop of the ballast.
The culture of the company whose main business is operational support is fundamentally different from the one that deals with clouds, software, and long-term R&D projects. Not to mention cycles and sales methods.
The growing popularity of clouds, as well as broader usage areas, plus the lack of experts and engineers drive customer`s interest not just to outsource or out staff tasks to maintain IT, but also to increased competition in the managed services market. Offers exist for any pocket or need: starting with full coverage of any infrastructures and clouds by companies like RackSpace to SaaS products such as EPAM Syndicate which manages serverless applications in AWS. Plus AWS itself offers such a kind of service, while Microsoft as usual relies on partners. The managed services market is a wide, but crowded valley and soon it will be very crushing.
Printers, storage systems, laptops, and so on - all of these businesses at some point turned from promising and profitable business for IBM into ballast as technology and market evolved and technology became a commodity. As an example — servers — once it was a high-margin business with niche and expensive solutions. At present, the servers are a commodity, manufacturers are consolidated, and dozens of offers from different companies available. This is why the x86 servers business was sold, as opposed to the mainframes — through narrow, but still interesting and inaccessible to a wide range of manufacturers.
After Satya Nadella signing on CEO position Microsoft quickly moved its main interest to modern reality - clouds. IBM, also because of scale, turned out to be much more inert, plus the bet on blockchain and artificial intelligence, including Watson.
Therefore IBM, during its transformation returned to the starting point. The dismissal of infrastructure solutions in favor of applications has led to the need for modern methods — clouds and containers, which are the execution environment of modern applications.
At the current stage of IT evolution, this may not be the last time when IBM makes an unexpected step, and the transformation that began a decade ago still seems to last as much, no less.