You’ll read more detailed analysis of IBM’s results elsewhere on HotViews. See IBM services signings crash. But IBM was not the only company to report upbeat results last night. Both Intel and VMWare produced results which beat expectations.
There was a common theme running through all these results – Mobile internet devices connected to the Cloud. Paul Otellini (CEO at Intel) said “we are seeing an explosion of devices connected to the internet”. At both IBM and Intel this resulted in a surge of sales for data centre-type hardware to feed these Cloud-connected devices. And, of course, this boosted VMWare which makes software to improve the efficiency of said data centres. VMWare reported a massive 33% increase in revenues. Overall, IBM’s Cloud-based revenues “increased five fold”.
Seven years back we introduced our “Diversity of Performance” theme. Although tech markets in the developed world (and the UK in particular) in their totality are ‘flat’, that flatness covers huge diversity of performance. Last night we saw vivid demonstrations of this. The parts of IBM and Inte
l that were associated with the Cloud did very, very well. Their other more conventional marketplaces did not. VMWare is in a ‘Cloud sweet spot’ and is reaping the benefits.
Tonight we will get another example with Apple. We expect another stellar performance to set side by side with pretty depressing results from their competitors like Nokia, Acer etc.
There has never been a time when being ‘in the right place with the right products and the right ‘go-to-market’ model’ has been more crucial to success.
Footnote - The chart shows our best estimate of the explosion in the number of mobile devices capable of connecting to the internet (MIDs). From 500m in 2000 to c2b today to over 10b in 2020. No better illustration of what is happening in the market and the drivers behind this 'Diversity of Performance' we report above.