IBM's Cloud Business Rises
It was a stellar quarter for IBM as the company's reported second quarter revenues of $26.7 billion were up 12 percent, and net income of $3.7 billion was up 8 percent. That's certainly not a bad way to cap off a quarter in which the company turned 100 years old.
Buoyed by strong services, software and hardware revenues, Big Blue also talked up its cloud business, which is on track to double this year. Within its Integrated Technology Services business, cloud-based services revenue grew 200 percent. Since IBM did not break out those revenues, it's hard to get too excited about that figure for the moment.
However, IBM said it has won 2,000 cloud deals so far this year, and the average private cloud transaction has tripled, said IBM's senior VP and CFO Mark Loughridge in his prepared remarks during the company's earnings call. "In the first half of 2011, cloud revenue has already exceeded our full year 2010 results, keeping us on track to double our cloud revenue for the year," Loughridge said.
IBM beefed up its cloud offerings earlier this year, when it launched SmartCloud, a product designed to enhance the company's public cloud infrastructure services, and Workload Deployer, a private cloud solution.
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 07/20/2011 at 1:14 PM