IBM's strategic initiative led the way in 2015, with cloud now a $10 billion business and security a $2 billion unit. Systems and analytics also grew.
Despite another quarterly revenue slide, IBM sees a silver lining in its strategic imperatives as these key focus areas—cloud, analytics, mobile, social and security—show significant growth and indicate Big Blue is devoted to succeeding in its transformation.In the fourth quarter of 2015, IBM saw its revenue decline 9 percent to $22.1 billion; however the company's strategic imperatives revenue grew 26 percent (adjusting for currency and the System x divestiture) to $28.9 billion and now represents 35 percent of the company's overall revenue.For all of 2015, IBM's total cloud revenue grew 43 percent to $10.2 billion. Cloud delivered as-a-service revenue grew 50 percent to $4.5 billion, business analytics grew 7 percent to $17.9 billion, mobile revenue more than tripled and security revenue grew 5 percent."Our strategic imperatives continued strong performance, up 26 percent for the year," said Martin Schroeter, IBM senior vice president and chief financial officer. "This now represents 35 percent of IBM's revenue. Our profit and margin reflect our portfolio actions as we shift to higher value, as well as the level of investments we're making to drive our transformation." Schroeter spoke of how large companies with several applications and processes are looking to IBM to drive broad-based transformations to the cloud. This underscores how the intersection of analytics and cloud continues to play to IBM's strengths, and how hybrid cloud is emerging as a major bet for businesses, he said. As part of a recently signed a $1.5 billion cloud services deal with European Bank BNP Paribas, IBM will operate two of the bank's data centers in Belgium as hybrid cloud centers, and provide cloud infrastructure and a suite of transformation cloud services spanning applications testing, business intelligence, security and core banking solutions, in addition to big data analytics.IBM customers are looking to transform their most critical systems into hybrid cloud environments, and the complexity of these partnerships in several cases results in larger engagements, he said. In fact, in the fourth quarter, IBM signed 26 services deals greater than $100 million, and for the full year of 2015. the company signed over 70 of these substantial transactions, which is 40 percent more than the previous year."Now about 70 percent of those transactions feature hybrid cloud content, which reflects both the value our clients see in hybrid, and the reality that not all of their workloads will be optimized for the cloud," he said.Two prominent market research firms, Forrester and Synergy Research, recently named IBM as a leader in hybrid cloud. Also, over the the previous year, several leading brands adopted IBMs Cloud platform for analytics and hybrid workloads, including Ford, Ethiad Airways, EVRY, Finnair, Marriot International, ANZ, Columbia Pipeline, Coca-Cola Amatil, the U.S. Army and several more. IBM also opened new cloud centers in India, Brazil, Canada, Italy, Mexico, Germany, Australia and the Netherlands, expanding its cloud footprint to more than 40 data centers in every major financial market around the world.In addition, systems integrators such as Accenture, CSC, Wipro, Infosys, HCL and Cognizant adopted IBM's Cloud platform. And Big Blue built on partnerships with Tech Mahindra, Cap Gemini and TCS to accelerate hybrid cloud deployments. Combined, more than 100,000 global developers will be trained on IBM's Bluemix platform-as-a-service technology to accelerate analytics, cognitive and mobile app development. IBM now has more than more 140 APIs and services on Bluemix focused on data analytics, cognitive computing, the Internet of things and more.IBM also made a series of acquisitions to accelerate the delivery of data-driven cloud workloads across industries, including The Weather Company, Cleversafe, Meteorix, StrongLoop, Compose, Merge Healthcare, AlchemyAPI, BlueBox and Clearleap. And just the previous week, IBM announced its acquisition of Ustream as well as the launch of the new IBM Cloud Video Services unit.
- eWeek