IBM Needs to Reposition Itself for the Cloud Computing Era
September 20, 2013
Grazed from BusinessWeek. Author: Sarah Frier.
How’s this for bleeding edge: The average member of IBM’s (IBM) senior executive leadership team started at the company in 1985, when the Internet was still a government project and Steve Jobs had just been fired from Apple (AAPL). Chief Executive Officer Ginni Rometty joined IBM in 1981, two years out of Northwestern University’s engineering school, and has been there ever since.
That’s a deep and experienced bench. The question is whether the tech giant has the right managerial perspective for what confronts it in 2013. IBM finds itself on the wrong side of a major technology shift. In the cloud era, corporate clients can rent server capacity and processing power for far less than IBM charges to hire its consultants or buy its hardware…
Rometty, who became CEO in January 2012, needs to pull off a strategic shift that enables IBM to be a dominant player in faster-growing markets like cloud computing, data analytics, and mobile devices. She’ll have to lead IBM out of a period of stagnation—revenue from its core businesses has been flat for five years—and deliver organic growth instead of the financial engineering and asset sales that have defined most of her tenure…
Read more from the source @ http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-09-19/ibms-rometty-needs-to-prep-the-tech-giant-for-the-cloud-computing-era