Having gone through several significant market changes, IBM is adept at transformation and will continue to do so by pushing through its investment in key technology areas such as blockchain and quantum computing.
"This is a company that knows how to transform [where] many companies do not survive [changes]," said Big Blue's Asia-Pacific chairman and CEO, Harriet Green, who pointed to the company's ability to evolve amidst economic uncertainties. Naysayers, for instance, had said mainframes were losing relevance as businesses moved to the cloud and servers gained higher compute power.
However, these systems still were a mainstay today especially amongst banks, with IBM continuing to release new offerings in the product category, Green said in an interview with ZDNet. She noted that the tech vendor had just announced its z14 series[1], touted as mainframes for cloud data centres and capable of handling 12 billion data incidents a day.
The Asia-Pacific CEO was responding to questions about 106-year-old IBM's future amidst declining revenues[2] and competition against comparatively younger players, such as Google and Amazon.
For the first time in 22 consecutive quarters[3], IBM in January reported a year-on-year revenue growth of 3.6 percent. However, its annual numbers dipped 1 percent, marking the company's sixth consecutive year of revenue decline to US$79.14 billion.
According to Green, IBM was "one of few tech companies" with over 100 years in history that had been through "extraordinary transformation". She noted that Dell had to exit the stock market[4] because it was unable to access capital and Hewlett-Packard[5], too, had its challenges.
The IBM executive said the company had been driving its transformation with investments in "strategic imperatives", specifically, artificial intelligence (AI), cloud,