IBM Folds the Road Map Hand

As far back as 2012,  we questioned the utility of the 2015 Road Map and its construction. Back in 2013, after CEO Virginia Rometty's overly enthusiastic presentation at Innovation Day, we felt that IBM may have been losing its way.  With the announcement of 3Q 2014 EPS, the Road Map has finally been abandoned. Better late than never.

The CEO's coming on to the investor conference call breaks with an IBM tradition: what a lousy tradition that was!  Abandoning the Road Map, though it came late, perhaps finally symbolizes CEO Rometty's uncoupling from the heritage of her predecessor, under whose leadership the company failed to act on a clearly emerging change in the demands customers would make on their key vendors for IT hardware, software, and services.

Shares outstanding have been reduced by a staggering fifty percent since they beginning of the mega-programs. We have written about these before, so need to go over the ground. Hopefully, it will become less of a focus.

We have always talked about the need for the Tech's Four Horsemen to reinvest in their core businesses, if indeed they want to stay relevant to their customers.  The good news is that IBM, in the CFO's prepared remarks, made specific reference to some sizeable initiatives:

"In the first quarter, you’ll remember that we announced a number of initiatives that
support the shift to our strategic areas of data, cloud, and systems of engagement.
These included the launch of Bluemix, which is our cloud platform-as-a service for
the enterprise, it included a $1.2 billion investment to globally expand SoftLayer
cloud hubs, and it included a $1 billion investment to bring Watson’s cognitive
capabilities to the enterprise. In the second quarter, we made progress to
implement these initiatives, including in June, Bluemix became generally available,
we opened new SoftLayer data centers, we started to ship POWER8, and expanded
the OpenPOWER consortium, and we completed substantially all of the divestiture
of our customer care business.
More recently, we announced additional actions to continue our shift to higher
value. You saw last week that we are investing $3 billion over the next 5 years in
research and early stage development to create the next generation of chip
technologies. Those will fuel the systems required for cloud, big data and
cognitive systems.And just a couple of days ago IBM and Apple announced a strategic global partnership to provide a new level of business value from mobility, for enterprise
clients."

SoftLayer was a big deal acquisition, and making these investments confirms the commitment to add value to it, not just to book revenue.

The next thing the CEO needs to do quickly is to act on something she noted in 2012, the irrelevance and misalignment of the go-to-market model of the old sales force.  Customers are crying out for a change: make it easier to deal with you and to figure out where our ROI lies!