IBM Records Highest Quarterly Sales Driven by Cloud
IBM has recorded highest quarterly sales growth in more than two years driven by its high-margin cloud computing business. Sales from its cloud computing services business jumped 21% to $6.5 billion in the last quarter. Cloud spending by clients in retail, manufacturing and travel industries picked up after the initial pandemic-driven slump globally.
The company recorded a sales decline in global technology services, its largest unit, but that was largely offset by a rise in revenue in the remaining three units, including a surprise growth in the business that hosts mainframe computers.
Total revenue rose nearly 1% to $17.73 billion in the quarter, beating analysts’ average estimate of $17.35 billion, according to IBES data from Refinitiv.
Gartner’s IT Spending Predictions Boost Tech Companies’ Morale
Gartner recently stated that digital transformation is on a fast-track as IT spending has increased due to Covid-19. According to the latest forecast by Gartner, the worldwide IT spending is projected to total $4.1 trillion in 2021, an increase of 8.4% from 2020. Few of the Industry Veterans in India expressed their thoughts and opinions on the Gartner forecast and what this forecast means for their industry.
S Sriram, Chief Strategy Officer at iValue InfoSolution said that, “Pandemic reinforced the importance of technology investments to extend flexibility in different lockdown scenarios including work from home. We are excited on the growth opportunities for the IT fraternity focused around services and solutions to empower business to power safe, secure and scalable digitalisation of business. We expect relevant IT to grow at 2-times of GDP which would be around 26% for Fy22.”
Prashanth GJ, CEO at Technobind stated that, “The Gartner report on the world-wide IT spending forecast is pretty much in line with what we hear from CIOs in India. Coming out of a difficult year when a lot of IT spend was made on extenuating circumstances where the focus was on ensuring business continuity by providing access for remote working environment. This year will see spends on two fronts – consolidation of the strategy and execution for a more continued work from home culture and second is to re-start the paused transformation projects.
Further, Gurpreet Singh, Managing Director at Arrow PC highlighted that, “It is not just the growth which organizations need to focus on, an employee-centric approach is crucial to ensure that employees are up to date on technology and the IT infrastructure they are using. Due to the after effects of the pandemic, there is a necessity for companies to carefully plan their expenditure. As remote working has become the new norm, tech companies need to watch their budget and improve the remote working environment,” he said.
