A Springboard To Services

Just had a chance to digest the IBM Quarterly results. I remember almost to the day, two years ago doing the same thing and incurring the wrath of IBM for pointing out the poor performance of the then BCS, now GBS group, which was struggling across the region, especially in comparison with Accenture. Well Accenture are still nailing it, but IBM from a services point of view seems to have really improved considerably in the last 18 months from a sales point of view. A couple of key metrics that struck me.

Last quarter in India alone they signed more than $1.4 billion in new domestic services contracts in India.

Each region of APxJ, ie India, China, Australia/New Zealand, ASEAN, and Korea grew between 15 percent and 25 percent at constant currency.

Japan is still an ongoing concern for IBM, like the issue for cracking the SMB market, it is not something that is easily solved. The interesting factor will be whether or not pulling it out of AP and making it organisationally closer to Armonk will help drive the business.

IBM has always been a good sales organisation, the issue now will be the delivery that at times has been a potential Achilles heel for it. Not all projects of course would go bad, but enough to worry clients. One thing that it has on it's size is the momentum in a lot of emerging markets as a result of it's exceptional hiring for global delivery.

News overnight confirming that Microsoft will bid for Yahoo. The prie is high,a nd Yahoo has been eclipsed by Google in terms of browser share as well as perception, so it is an expensive grab for share by Microsoft, however, it is a deal that highlights the expertise of Google in really biting into Microsoft's market, as well as the acknowldegement by Microsoft that it is an old world company, despite all the investment that it has made.