IBM saw from the get-go that the cloud was going to cause a major disruption to its business.

“We knew it was a massive opportunity for IBM, but not in a way that necessarily fit our mold,” said Jim Comfort, who is now CTO for IBM Cloud. “Every dimension of our business model would change — we knew that going in.”

Change they have, and there’s little denying that the cloud businesses is now a ray of sunshine brightening IBM’s outlook as its legacy businesses struggle. In its second-quarter earnings report last week, cloud revenue was up 30 percent for the quarter year over year, reaching $11.6 billion. Revenue from systems hardware and operating systems software, on the other hand, was down more than 23 percent.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here