Blockchain

IBM living in the past as upstarts take market share

IBM’s revenues are falling, margins are thinning, its legacy business is shrinking and its executive compensation is a joke.

In an article for Seeking Alpha, Crispus Nyaga argues that the company has been left behind, is slow to change and should be avoided by investors. “The dire situation of the company increases when you include the upstarts like Alphabet and Amazon that are now competing and taking market share from IBM,” he adds.

A major problem is IBM’s full focus on corporate clients, Nyaga observes. All its services are provided to companies. It has done this while ignoring the high-margin consumer market that Microsoft, Alphabet and Amazon are thriving in. “For example, it would be easy for IBM to make money from consumers by offering cloud storage products like Google Drive, Box, and OneDrive, without investing in CAPEX. This is because the company already owns servers and storage worldwide.”

Blockchain leader

Big Blue is, at least, making significant progress in the blockchain space. It has cemented its position as the go-to company for blockchain deployments, with IBM ranked first by 65% of the organisations recently surveyed by Juniper Research. Microsoft was in second place with 7%.

It’s also piling up those all important patents. We recently reported that Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba had nabbed the top spot, ahead of IBM, on a new iPR Daily list that ranks global organisations by the number of blockchain-related patents they’ve filed.

The media outlet used data up until 10^thAugust from across China, the EU, America, Japan and South Korea, and also consulted the International Patent System from the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).

Alibaba filed 90 blockchain-related patent applications and IBM was close behind with 89. In third place was Mastercard (80) followed by Bank of America (53). Next up was People’s Bank of China (PBoC), which has filed a total of 44 patent applications around its central bank digital currency project.

Scott Thompson

Scott has been working in technology and business journalism for nearly 20 years, with a focus on FinTech, retail, payments and disruptive technology. He has been Editor of such titles as FStech, Retail Systems and IBS Journal and also contributed to the likes of Retail Technology Innovation Hub, PaymentEye, bobsguide, Essential Retail, Open Banking Hub, TechHQ and Internet of Business.