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IBM Lost the Cloud

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Re: IBM Lost the Cloud

#4

Post by lbriner »

Isn't this a well-known part of a company's lifecycle. You stop innovating and try and live off of your previous reputation. Yes, there is inertia and sticky customers but ultimately, people will eventually ask why they pay a premium for something that they can get equally well elsewhere. Usually, by that time, you cannot recover your position.

At least Microsoft learned this before it was too late and went hard into cloud, Linux and open-source.

Re: IBM Lost the Cloud

#5

Post by greenail »

I would guess that one reason so many legacy big tech companies failed to compete against AWS is that they had a critical mass of sellers who were not equipped to sell cloud. Combine that with existing relationships with CIO/IT folks who were incentivized to maintain the status quo makes it very hard to actually do things differently. I believe the key thing AWS changed was that the sellers were not gatekeepers to purchasing. AWS sellers had to figure out how to add value beyond just doing demos and negotiating pricing and contracts. I doubt IBM was willing to change it's sales process or who it targeted for building relationships within the customers organizations.

Re: IBM Lost the Cloud

#7

Post by throwaway-ibm »

> Over and over again during the last decade, IBM engineers were asked to build special one-off projects for key clients at the expense of their road maps for building the types of cross-customer cloud services offered by the major clouds. Top executives at some of the largest companies in the country — the biggest banks, airlines and insurance companies — knew they could call IBM management and get what they wanted because the company was so eager to retain their business, the sources said.

This! We literally build & prioritize feature work based on one-off customer requests...

Re: IBM Lost the Cloud

#8

Post by samstave »

I recall back in the early days, working with IBM professional services on a large contract Lockheed was doing with DOW Chem, but hosted in IBMs datacenter space at a very large DC in South San Jose...

It was a FN nightmare to get anything done - it took a month just to get static IPs allotted to the project, way too many meetings, too many PMs on the IBM side and the pricing was absolutely ridiculous. IIRC we were charging DOW ~$40,000 a month to host two Racks in the DC when prices for bandwidth were ~$900/MB at the time...

I then worked with IBM and Intel when Intel was deploying a an OpenStack setup for RedHat. Same level of BS to get simple things accomplished. It was one of those cringeworthy projects where you had PMs on the team who didnt know jack about anything we were doing and were super slow to get anything done. You just cringed when on a call and people throughout the project were so disjointed and disconnected that you felt embarrassed for them on the calls...

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