IBM is a consulting company. Only IBM Research and their mainframe division do anything interesting in tech. And their research division seems to be mainly there for marketing/image purposes (helping consultants sell overpriced “solutions” to clueless top management).

That's the joke

It's my understanding that they are largely a consultancy now, helping their clients move things onto their cloud products. I imagine there is quite a bit of vendor lock-in. Seeing as the need for cloud migration is ever-growing in every single industry, I don't see IBM becoming totally irrelevant any time soon. But they are definitely past "Day 1".

They are far more of a services and support company than a tech company these days. Their current tech is mostly used by their services teams to implement solutions.

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

As I've said before in comments here on HN and Twitter, there is no real definition of a "tech company" or "tech industry", the word "tech" defines the operating model. This is the dirty little secret VCs don't like to tell you because it means they can call Tesla a tech company (its a car and battery manufacturer) to fetch tech-like valuations or Facebook a tech company (its a media company). Tech operating models typically net high gross margins (i.e. Facebook) which is one of its major defining characteristics.

I therefore posit there is no such thing as a "tech industry", but rather businesses that sit on a spectrum of operating models from:

- Back office IT supported

- Tech enabled

- Tech Led

Personally I would define IBM as a Diversified IT, IT Services and Software company that is has an operating model that sits somewhere between tech enabled and tech led.

Only novel tech they have been working on that I’m aware of is quantum computers…