Mainframe and some Red Hat? What else?
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OP: stop posting useless, irrelevant fluff here. Nobody believes that you're trying to start a conversation with fellow IBMers on an "anonymous" LAYOFFS board.
Folks, beware social engineers, trolls, shills, and fishers. Don't engage these posts.
I’m gonna say...none. There’s really no area of ibm that is ACTUALLY GROWING. Our sales people are shuffled around constantly and can’t make long term strategic deals, our products change or rather rebrand everyday, we then have too many generalists who don’t know the competitive landscape of these products and lose to companies who KNOW what they’re selling, we don’t have a public cloud footprint, we refuse to make REAL changes to licensing that could put us in line with the market direction...I could go on. If you want to make a transformation, it involves sacrificing the short term for the long game. After 5 years at ibm in the throes of this “transformation”...I’ve come to the conclusion we are not brave enough. Period.
Security products and services are always in need, especially with the recent nation state attacks.
Laas: Layoff as a service
I believe the Mainframe is cyclical with an element of built-in obsolescence. I don't believe it is much of a constant revenue stream. So when customers renew their mainframe, they typically refresh their mainframe storage at the same time. The result is a spike in revenue and then a residual decline until the next refresh. The profit from the spike needs to feed the machine until the next cycle comes around. So it can be hot one minute and cold for an extended period.
Is "Executive Offices" a product? That seems to be the only hot area and safe place to be in IBM.
Mainframes is a lucrative business, but it's not growing. Many customers are as old as mainframes ( System 360 was announced in '64). Just like ibm, these old guards face competition and are targets for disruption. There is a word on the internet that a good investment strategy is to short ibm's top customers. Now that's sad.
Mainframe is definitely not hot
Well seeing how many layoffs are happening in cloud we know what's not hot.
hot is the wrong term. IBM is a niche player in certain areas. For ex. healthcare/utility companies, like to use IBM Power/SAP Hana product. Red Hat is big with universities and research facilities. Mainframe is big with banking but also has some roots in printing and healthcare. Mainframe is build as you go solution. A lot of it requires system programmers to maintain. COBOL and JCL programming on mainframe is huge. IBM unfortunately is still losing a lot of ground in these areas. Mainframe is becoming either too expensive for companies to effectively use and not enough people want to learn it. IBM power products are being replaced by other open system products on cheaper x86 machines.