Which company first comes to mind when someone asks you about a company that had quite a solid prospect, until IBM acquired it? I’m almost certain that Watson Health would have had a much better future now if IBM hadn’t gotten its fingers involved. Watson Health, unfortunately, is not the only such company.
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ISS RIP
@1vce wrote "SPSS ... ignorant and psychotic R&D management"
Let me guess: One was short and one was tall. Right?
Pay attention here IBM You reap what you sow This is YOUR future And sooo well deserved Bahahaha Fv
Serious question - so where does Compose (https://www.compose.com/) fit here. It's certainly not a failure - so is it a success, or is it still in a kind of purgatory?
i'd add Bigfix to that as well - was a great product then IBM blue rinsed it - adding DB2 and websphere into it and it never recovered.
Don’t be surprised if “new IBM” gets absorbed by one of the Hyperscalers once GTS is gone and IBM has streamlined off the legacy. It will have to be a USA company due to the mainframes proprietary nature
@odj+1azHWNRS, in case you have forgotten the person who was running the show before AK's tenure was another IBM lifer Robert LeBlanc. Also they explored VM path before the current VPC which ended up being a failed project.
And this OP forebodes the future of IBM. It will become an easier acquisition target after the spinoff and one of the big times is going to sn---h it up. Chop it up and sell it off. So befitting Fv
Regarding Cyanea: the CEO of that company was a drinking buddy of John Swainson who headed IBM SWG at the time. It was a sweetheart deal. Funny detail: Cyanea's CEO chose a specific day to ink the deal, on the advice of his fortune-teller.
EZSource a.k.a. ADDI (and others)
Awesome stuff.... No one -- absolutely no one -- is really going to buy it!
Worst ever acquisition? Cyanea, bought way back in 2004. Never sold a single license in my territory, a terrible product.
Truven Health Analytics was a great place to work with so many devoted and talented people. IBM made the last four years a blood bath for the employees involved.
Novus consulting group. Which was a top-notch storage consulting company. Top skills and proprietary tools that no one else had.
RIP. Bought and buried.
@1ucv said "Open shift on mainframe really?"
No kidding! Every time I see a story about how great this is going to be I just shut up and smile silently, The whole mainframe ecosystem is not about containerizing any of the 8 million moving parts. It's about keeping that Rube Goldberg monstrosity ticking away until my retirement.
I'm missing something because as far as I can tell, you start with designs that can be containerized and then implement them. The idea of somehow containerizing a behemoth that has sprawled in so many undocumented ways over 30, 40 or 50 years of development is something I struggle to wrap my head around.
RedHat is awesome. Finding a zOS shop that would be improved by wrapping stuff up in OpenShift (and thereby leveraging RedHat on the mainframe) will be really tough.
ROLM.. may it RIP
Why IBM needed a PBX product.. beats me
SPSS. Though when IBM acquired the company, the flagship product was already a piece of disgraceful cr#p due to the ignorant and psychotic R&D management. IBM completely destroyed the company. Some say the product is making a comeback. I say so what... Why would you spend a penny on something that still reeks of sh#t when you can get better analytic products for free? FREE!!! LMFAO
PWC. Single worst acquisition ever made, hands down.
Cognos.
Informix hands down
Actually, Watson Health was comprised of 4 companies that IBM acquired (Merge Healthcare, Phytel, Explorys and Truven Health Analytics) and IBM completely wrecked all of them, so 4 for the price of 1.
IBM acquired Silverpop on 2014. They destroyed Silverpop and in a few years they sold it. 😅
Kenexa, closed
Netezza. Was taking the dbms market by storm. IBM had a few good years but ki---d it and would not invest in a true hybrid next gen system. Instead they brought back an old DB2 / IBM based system (which was what was always losing to Netezza when they were a competitor) and called “it” the new Netezza.
Totally squandered
In a couple years it’ll be redhat. Open shift on mainframe really? Redhat may take more time to dissolve than most people realize. Open source is great for innovation.. just not for mainframe.
Think about how many companies are migrating off the mainframe and into cloud native apps including those with a more modern software architecture.
Ilog. They were selling amazing prescriptive analytics software right before the AI craze. IBM stopped investing, never understood what it had bought, and destroyed the value.
Rational! It was a best in class software company that was very dominant until IBM acquired them. Out of 3500 employees, there are probably 20 left...they even sold the IP to a partner for a song because they couldn't understand the customer or the space....
Disagree about Softlayer. The people running it when IBM acquired it - and for far too long afterwards - were committed to the idea that bare metal servers were a differentiator compared to the VM route everybody else was heading down. (Well, I guess they were right, but not in a good way.) They also made a lot of other bad architecture and infrastructure decisions over a period of several years that IBM Cloud is still recovering from. And on top of that, without IBM they would have had even less capital for investment.
So while it's fair to say that IBM didn't help Softlayer, without IBM nobody would even remember that they ever existed.
Agree with @waf. SoftLayer.
It's too bad IBM can't acquire cancer, COVID–19, uncomfortable bloating, ...
Softlayer. It had a chance.
Lotus was always doomed by its lame Notes architecture. But IBM didn't help. Same with Tivoli.
A real question to be asked is: Why did IBM ever buy Rational? Nothing really good happened there.
Ask again in 5 years and maybe we'll agree that RedHat was crushed buy being associated with IBM,