Specifically, next year, Managed Infrastructure Services, which is still part of the Global Services division, will be separated from IBM as an independent and publicly traded company. The new company, now known as NewCo in the materials, will become the largest provider of managed infrastructure with $ (billion) annual sales of $ 19 billion from day one, inheriting more than 4,600 customers, including three-quarters of Fortune 100 companies. It will also receive over 90,000 employees out of the current total of 353,600.
The “old” IBM will keep everything else and its efforts should be even more focused on cloud services. Together with other services and software, they have so far accounted for over 60% of the company’s turnover, and after the NewCo department, they will represent almost the entire turnover.
In practice, this means that providing infrastructure to corporate customers is no longer an interesting activity for IBM to keep. Big players are relying more and more on the cloud (an interesting contradiction with the 75% Fortune 100 in the same report), which will bring higher margins for IBM. Little IBM players have never been very interested in and Big Blue historically, it certainly had no problem cutting off a division in which it did not see growth potential.
Although the new company is to remain the preferred provider of infrastructure for the old one, the new situation will give both the opportunity to look elsewhere. For the average computer user, practically nothing changes, because it is not entirely a service that an individual would use. We noticed much more when the logos on ThinkPads changed sixteen years ago.
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