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Comment by hestefisk | Hacker News Reader

Outside of big iron mainframe contracts for governments and banks who buys IBM these days? Excluding Red Hat, I would say they are largely managing themselves into obsolescence.

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Almost nobody and it does not matter. IBM core business is not hardware anymore, they are consulting company like Accenture, McKinsey, Deloitte, etc [1]. The software & hardware company from the '80 and '90 died and filled for bankruptcy in 1999.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/274823/ibms-global-reven...

I would caution comparing IBM to McKinsey. Very different DNA. Also, vs Accenture\Deloitte there is a big difference in that the two don't have their own products to push into boxes in component diagrams - IBM does and execs know it. This puts it very much at a disadvantage.

Accenture, Deloitte & IBM are considered Tier 2. The BMW, Mercedes, Audi if you will.

McKinsey, Bain, BCG are Tier 1. The Lamborghini, Ferrari, Aston Martin, etc.

Tier 2 do their darndest to get into Tier 1 but the nature of the work is very different and the chasm between tiers is hard to cross just like in the car industry. Source: I've done extensive work in both tiers.

McKinsey just lost their schedule contracts with the feds: https://federalnewsnetwork.com/acquisition-policy/2020/05/gs...

Probably depends on location? I’ve never heard of Bain or BCG.

Nope. McKinsey, Bain, and BCG are the tier 1 everywhere. McKinsey is by far the biggest and best-known, but it's like MIT and Caltech. One is bigger, and one is smaller. The smaller is less well-known, but it's no worse.

In this case, the smaller companies are, if anything, slightly higher-end (more boutique).

I'm not actually sure the Tier 2 are trying to become Tier 1. It's like comparing Walmart to Tiffany & Co. They're very different business models, but upscale doesn't necessarily beat mass market.

Just curious, as an industry outsider -- what do MBB do that make them Tier 1?

My experience is the Tier 2 vendors you've listed are more tactical, and typically handle execution (outsourcing etc.).

Whereas MBB are more strategic, C-Suite, but the value-add may or may not be significantly different from the former.

Price point, access, quality of analysts.

I would say the model has changed from selling your own software explicitly to writing most of the software (glueing systems+customizations) for Client 1, and reusing most of it when Client 2 roughly asks for the same thing.

What about EPAM Systems btw?

No they are not (only) that. IBM is a global cloud provider on par with the rest as far as the basic offers go.

IBMs cloud is on par? With whom? Certainly not AWS and Azure. Nor GCP. Not even with OCI.

IBM doesn't have it's own cloud, it runs on AWS.

Edit: I was confused by this:

https://www.ibm.com/cloud/architecture/architectures/ibm-clo...

Seriously now? https://cloud.ibm.com/login

IBM cloud has nothing to do with AWS or any other provider. It is an autonomous provider just like AWS, Azure, Google, Alibaba, etc

Disclaimer: Close friend works there.

Jesus, get your facts straight before shooting such inaccuracies.

That is an outright lie. I’ve seen IBM data centers.

The most basic googling will show this is a lie.

"who buys IBM these days" is answered by your question and it's a money printing machine which due to the contracts and how they position themselves, hardly ever jams. I've been in quite some government agencies over the world and you would be surprised with how many services and consulting they are hard-wired in organizations. IBM MQ, JBOSS, DB2, iSeries and so forth - if you let IBM run its course, it's like cancer spreading and at some time there's a point of no return (and this happened years ago mostly). Over time the sales people get so ingrained into the organization, it's just commonly accepted IBM has tentacles all around the org. and internal architects who try to reform quickly learn it is near impossible, even though there are cheaper alternatives available because of how slow and multi layered these bureaucracies are. Good luck trying to get all stakeholders around the table in time and in a justly manner without IBM sitting at the table grinning at their contracts. Once they are in, they won't let loose and maybe the glory days are over, they will continue to print money from this for years to come.

> governments and banks A look at this (probably somewhat outdated) list (http://ibmmainframes.com/references/a41.html) seems to imply lots of companies with any kind of legacy software still do.

Outside of mainframes, from my own experience, their Spectrum Scale/GPFS (parallel filesystem) is still the default buy in HPC. Not necc the _best_ choice, but still the one you wouldn't get fired for buying.

My university’s cluster was running off of Spectrum Scale/GPFS with two sets of hardware: one from IBM the other DDN. Our half-PB expansion was purchased through DDN as their gear is more performant and not as expensive.

One of the other admins was investigating the Lustre filesystem when I left.

They do have, or used to, have a thriving? consultancy business.

Plus I'm sure they do sell enterprise software at extortionate prices

They do have IBM Watson, which has seen some uptake. [1]

Not sure how much success they're having with their other cloud offerings, tho.

[1]: https://enlyft.com/tech/products/ibm-watson

Edit: Added source

IBM Watson has been an abject failure. I think IBM dumped a billion dollars into what were essentially 90% shell scripts sed'ing and awk'ing datasets.

From their Q4/2019 results:

Revenue Highlights 4Q19 Total Revenue $21.8B

Cloud & Cognitive Software $7.2B

Global Business Services $4.2B

Global Technology Services $6.9B

Systems $3.0B

So Watson is a portion of the "Cloud and Cognitive".

Further down, it shows just the Cloud part:

Cloud Revenue $6.8B

$7.2B-$6.8B=$0.4B

Not bad, but $400M in Watson "Cognitive" revenue isn't a notable portion of $21.8B.

What uptake is it having? I've only ever seen it used as a marketing device.

Added source to my initial comment.

I doubt that this source is very accurate. The "List of the top companies using IBM Watson" is very odd.

You get better information from their annual report.

Watson is just a brand prefix at this point - it goes in front of a number of products like Watson Studio, Watson Machine Learning, Watson Assistant and so on.

The Watson groups, Watson health in particular but all of them in general, are some of the hardest hit groups in the last couple of RAs

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