IBM’s cloudy predicament is now widely understood.
BusinessWeek made IBM’s existential crisis a cover story (a concept that doesn’t really exist any more if you read the publication online):
Forbes then called out recently departed IBM CEO Sam Palmasaino for his financial engineering shenanigans with “Why IBM is in Decline”. Cringely went one better with the full Gibbon in his new book “The Decline and Fall of IBM”.
To which I say, welcome to the club!
IBM employees have been crawling out of the woodwork over the last year to defend the holy EPS roadmap (even as Wall Street tells them “um, you might stop the financial engineering games and optimize for survival at this point”). While I have listened patiently, not a single Big Blue booster made an argument based on their product portfolio or confidence in their ability to innovate or adapt. They have a bad case of assuming past performance guarantees future survival.
The most compelling argument I heard from any IBMer was “Well, at least we’re not HP”. HP is in a similar situation as IBM, except a few years behind. On the plus side, HP has less software legacy (there are positives to not being a software company period). I’m waiting for HP to buy Rackspace as their SoftLayer-like “Hail Mary”, except paying more and doing it a couple years later due to the need to rebuild their balance sheet “autonomy”. But a wise man once told me “life is too short to work with HP”, so enough about them. Unlike some other vendors, I don’t think anyone really cares whether HP make the next transition or not.
The storm clouds of creative destruction blow not just in Armonk and Palo Alto. Things also look blustery in San Jose, home of another dinosaur: Cisco (or as I like to call them, “the IBM of networking”).
Cisco has many parallels to IBM:
- Revenue has plateaued and oscillates between flat and down.
- Competitive threats abound including fundamental technical and economic disruption.
- They can’t innovate and have relied on buying R&D for even longer than IBM and to a greater degree.
- Lots of acquisitions that haven’t had much discernable impact. One can argue IBM has done better with its acquisitions, where they at least milk the installed base for revenue even if the acquired products go immediately into maintenance mode.
- They have lost the leading edge customers who prefer to build their own switches or rely on other vendors.
- Their biggest customers may face an existential threat by continuing to rely upon them, facing competitors who don’t have that legacy dependency.
- Their core competencies have shrunk to browbeating the press (and watch the press pay it back that the dam has finally broken on IBM after years of oppression) and manipulating Wall Street expectations (revenue only down 5.5% – it’s a beat!!!).
- They are dismissive of the threats they face (a la “it is early days for cloud”) and take their survival and market position for granted.
- Their product efforts focus on trying to pull innovation back into the old way of doing things (see Cisco’s ACI, which kind of misses the whole SDN point).
- They believe they can play with the big boys in cloud but on a bonsai budget. Cisco’s Intercloud is another “multi-year, one billion dollar investment” in cloud capex that amounts to about six weeks of Google’s capex spending.
Cisco is flailing all over the place when it comes to communicating their strategy:
- Competitive bluster and/or schizophrenia: they plan to “crush” VMware who is “enemy number one for Cisco” (but also maintain this SDN thing is not a big deal…). Yet VMware doesn’t even make their slide of competitors today or in 2018, when it seems they plan to compete exclusively with the cream of the late 20th century NASDAQ:
- Misdirection and/or distraction: “Hey, look at this $14 TRILLION dollar market over here. It isn’t just the Internet of Things, it is the Internet of Everything!” I’m a big believer in the Internet of Things (hold the “Every”) but am hard-pressed to understand what Cisco is going to do to capture any disproportionate part of that. Cisco’s IoT executives are so impressed with the opportunity they keep bailing out.
- Safety in numbers: they would like you to believe their challenges are not unique to Cisco, but plague the whole “industry” (aka Big Old Tech with no appearances from the companies taking share). John Chambers forecasts “brutal” times ahead and provides this handy chart by which to track his self-selected cohort’s misery:
Cisco picked the right peers with HP and IBM (aka Dinosaur Row), but Microsoft and Oracle are in a different class as I am sure this time series will prove out over time. We’ll be tracking the “Chambers Chart” going forward.