Silicon Investor - IBM

[George Statham] finance.yahoo.com

George Statham — 12/28/2025 3:57:40 PM

[zax] IBM created a quantum processor with over 1,000 qubits, a massive leap toward pr...

zax — 12/19/2025 5:00:06 PM

IBM created a quantum processor with over 1,000 qubits, a massive leap toward practical quantum computing. Qubits can represent 0 and 1 simultaneously, performing calculations exponentially faster than supercomputers. This breakthrough could revolutionize drug discovery, material science, and financial modeling.

Source: IBM Research / Nature

[Glenn Petersen] IBM shares soar to more than 10-year high on rosy AI outlook By Chibuike Oguh ...

Glenn Petersen — 1/26/2024 2:24:43 PM

IBM shares soar to more than 10-year high on rosy AI outlook

By Chibuike Oguh
Reuters
January 25, 202411:45 AM CST
Updated a day ago

NEW YORK, Jan 25 (Reuters) - IBM (IBM.N), opens new tab shares jumped nearly 13% to a more than 10-year high on Thursday after the company reported a better-than-expected revenue outlook backed by strong demand for its artificial intelligence (AI) services.

Orders from IBM's generative AI business, which includes bookings and sales from services such as those powered by its Watsonx AI platform, doubled in the fourth quarter and are expected to help its revenue grow by around 4%-6% in 2024, the company reported late on Wednesday.

Consulting firms and software companies, including Germany's SAP SE (SAPG.DE), opens new tab, account for much of IBM's AI-related bookings, IBM Chief Financial Officer James Kavanaugh told Reuters.
IBM shares rose to a peak of $196.89, their highest since June 2013, adding about $20 billion to the company's market capitalization. The stock is now up nearly 11% and on track for its biggest daily percentage gain since March 2020.

Reuters Graphics
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At least eight Wall Street analysts, including from Bank of America, JPMorgan, Jefferies and Evercore, raised their price targets for IBM's stock following the announcement.

The median price target of the 20 analysts covering IBM is $144.50, unchanged from a month ago, and their average recommendation is "hold", according to LSEG data.

IBM's stock is currently trading at about 17 times its next 12-month's expected earnings versus its 2-year historical average of about 14 times, while its peers were trading at about 20 times, per LSEG data.

Report this ad"We don't think IBM has seen the valuation benefit that some technology peers have from AI, as recent multiple expansion has trended generally below the primary comparisons we look to for valuation," they said.

Reporting by Chibuike Oguh in New York; Editing by Lance Tupper and Jan Harv

IBM shares soar to more than 10-year high on rosy AI outlook | Reuters

[Thomas M.] After pulling ads from Twitter for "racism" and "discrimination", IBM CEO Arvi...

Thomas M. — 12/12/2023 12:10:29 AM

After pulling ads from Twitter for "racism" and "discrimination", IBM CEO Arvind Krishna explicitly demands his employees be racist. He threatens to fire them if they aren't racist enough.

[X]

BREAKING LEAKED VIDEO: CEO of IBM @ArvindKrishna admits to using coercion to fire people and take away their bonuses unless they discriminate in the hiring process.

“You got to move both forward by a percentage that leads to a plus on your bonus," Krishna said about hiring… pic.twitter.com/UUK26HX8IP
— James O'Keefe (@JamesOKeefeIII) December 12, 2023

[/X]

Tom

[ibyte] Options trades at June expiry for Kyndryl look interesting, and not neutral.

ibyte — 2/25/2022 1:39:19 PM

[Glenn Petersen] How IBM lost the cloud Insiders say that marketing missteps and duplicated deve...

Glenn Petersen — 9/29/2021 6:14:39 PM

How IBM lost the cloud

Insiders say that marketing missteps and duplicated development processes meant IBM Cloud was doomed from the start, and eight years after it attempted to launch its own public cloud the future of its effort is in dire straits.

Tom Krazit
Protocol
September 29, 2021

The words stunned IBM's cloud executives in November 2013. Former CEO Ginni Rometty had just told them that Watson, IBM's dubious crown jewel, should run on the company's own Power chips inside SoftLayer, IBM's recently acquired cloud-computing division.

There was one big problem: SoftLayer, like all major cloud efforts at that point, only used x86 chips from Intel and AMD.

What came next can only be described as a scramble, according to sources who worked for IBM at the time. After throwing together a barely-working demo for IBM's Pulse conference in February 2014, where Rommety publicly announced the news, executives quickly convened in Texas, home to SoftLayer. They realized fulfilling Rometty's pledge would be daunting: They would have to rewrite parts of the Watson code base for the cloud, and quickly find, and then configure, enough Power servers to run alongside the all-x86 SoftLayer environment.

So began IBM's experiments with cloud computing, imperiled from the start by a maniacal focus on selling Watson at the height of its public awareness and doting obedience to a customer base that still didn't trust the cloud.

IBM was once — and still is, for people whose main sources of information about technology are television ads during sporting events — an American innovation icon, a company that literally created what we now think of as information technology. Its fortunes have risen and fallen with broader trends in computing, but around the time of that meeting in late 2013, its business and technology reputation began a steady decline that it has yet to avert.

Today, Rometty is gone, replaced by Arvind Krishna, the first technologist to hold the top seat at IBM since the 1970s. But IBM finds itself almost entirely dependent on its $34 billion purchase of Red Hat in order to stay relevant among modern IT buyers, and IBM executives don't really talk about its own public cloud division these days.

"They've given up on the idea of, 'we're going to be a major contender in the public cloud space,'" said Tracy Woo of Forrester Research. "Everyone is trying to win with edge [computing] in some way, and trying to create the most compelling story."

The opportunity was there for IBM: Longtime rival Microsoft successfully executed a pivot to cloud computing following the appointment of Satya Nadella in 2014, and while Azure was several years old at that point it had only started offering Linux virtual machines, the lingua franca of the cloud era, the year before IBM's SoftLayer acquisition.

Now, IBM considers itself a "hybrid cloud" company, according to its executive talking points and commercials. But IBM's use of such tech buzzwords is a familiar strategy to those who have followed the company over the last decade: It's trying to convince longtime customers to stick with the partner that brought them to the dance despite there being a plethora of interesting alternatives.

"IBM is all-in on hybrid cloud and AI, determining years ago that our clients' only feasible path to rapid digital transformation is through a hybrid cloud strategy. Public cloud is an integral piece of that strategy," IBM said in a statement.

So how did IBM miss the cloud? Interviews with more than a dozen current and former IBM executives and employees painted a picture of a company caught moving in two directions: a group that correctly understood how the cloud was going to play an enormous role in the future of enterprise computing, matched up against a sales-driven culture that prioritized the custom needs of its large customers over the work required to catch up with AWS.

The SoftLayer bulletin

It was an AWS deal with the CIA that made IBM think differently about the cloud.

In 2013, the now-dominant cloud provider won a contract to build the next-generation enterprise-tech infrastructure for the country's spies. That forced IBM to acknowledge that the cloud era had not only arrived, but also that it was losing, according to multiple sources who worked for the company at the time. And as it lodged an ultimately unsuccessful protest bid against the decision to award AWS the contract, IBM announced it had acquired SoftLayer in June 2013.

The takeover was problematic almost from the start, according to multiple sources who worked for IBM at the time. At the outset, IBM was content to let SoftLayer continue to grow with a decent degree of autonomy, but the two companies looked at the world from different vantage points.

SoftLayer was built and designed for small and medium-sized businesses and its leadership team believed that was the market around which it was designing its infrastructure strategy. That market was mostly concerned with cost and less concerned with features and availability, and SoftLayer designed its cloud services accordingly.

It operated 13 data centers when IBM acquired the company, but those data centers utilized relatively simple designs and were based almost exclusively around off-the-rack servers from Supermicro, according to sources. There's nothing inherently wrong with that approach, but at the time major cloud vendors were, and still are, designing their own servers with strict enterprise-grade performance and reliability criteria.

After a few years, IBM salespeople were eager to sell cloud services alongside a package of IBM's more traditional enterprise software, yet quickly found that SoftLayer didn't offer many of the services that huge corporations needed to embrace the cloud, according to the sources. Its data centers lacked some of the resiliency features that were table stakes at AWS, such as availability zones, and the servers weren't powerful enough to support large application deployments, they said.

And one of the biggest obstacles was SoftLayer's lack of support for virtual private cloud technology, which gives cloud customers additional control over how their applications run on cloud services. AWS introduced such a service in 2009, but IBM Cloud didn't get what one source called a "true" virtual private cloud service until 2019.

Some of these problems were understood at the time of the SoftLayer acquisition and IBM tech executives thought they could fix them in short order, according to sources. But IBM's culture during those years proved too much of a road block.

If there's one common thread through the experiences of multiple current and former IBM employees, including those who didn't work for the cloud division, it's the power that current customers had over everything IBM did.

Over and over again during the last decade, IBM engineers were asked to build special one-off projects for key clients at the expense of their road maps for building the types of cross-customer cloud services offered by the major clouds. Top executives at some of the largest companies in the country — the biggest banks, airlines and insurance companies — knew they could call IBM management and get what they wanted because the company was so eager to retain their business, the sources said.

This practice, which delayed work on key infrastructure services for months or even years, was still happening inside IBM as recently as last year, according to one source.

"To the extent IBM is a public cloud provider, they do so as it adds to their broader orientation as a hybrid cloud platform provider," said Melanie Posey, an analyst with S&P Global Market Intelligence. "And the stuff that's on IBM's hybrid cloud platform includes IBM's public cloud, which some of their traditional long-standing IT enterprise customers prefer, like, 'let's keep it all in the family.'"

Build it once, build it twice

Just a few years after acquiring SoftLayer, IBM's top executives knew their cloud strategy as designed was not going to work. Convinced they needed fresh eyes, they hired several executives from Verizon's cloud services business — which it would later acquire — to rebuild IBM Cloud.

John Considine became general manager of IBM Cloud Infrastructure in November 2016 and was given the leeway to install a brand-new cloud infrastructure architecture to replace SoftLayer's approach. He began work on a project internally code-named "Genesis," an ambitious attempt to build an enterprise-grade cloud system from scratch.

Before too long, however, IBM began to realize that Genesis was unlikely to scale well enough to be a competitive threat to AWS or Microsoft. A decision to use Intel's Red Rock Canyon networking chip proved particularly troublesome, according to sources, as it caused IBM to rank very poorly on a key (if not exactly workaday) test used by Gartner to rate cloud vendors: launching 1,000 virtual machines at the same time.

And at first, Genesis still lacked support for the key virtual private cloud technology that both engineers and salespeople had identified as important to most prospective cloud buyers.

This caused a split inside IBM Cloud: A group headed by the former Verizon executives continued to work on the Genesis project, while another group, persuaded by a team from IBM Research that concluded Genesis would never work, began designing a separate infrastructure architecture called GC that would achieve the scaling goals and include the virtual private cloud technology using the original SoftLayer infrastructure design.

Genesis would never ship. It was scrapped in 2017, and that team began work on its own new architecture project, internally called NG, that ran in parallel to the GC effort.

For almost two years, two teams inside IBM Cloud worked on two completely different cloud infrastructure designs, which led to turf fights, resource constraints and internal confusion over the direction of the division. The cancellation of Genesis forced IBM to write off nearly $250 million in Dell servers (a bitter irony, in that IBM sold its own server group just before acquiring SoftLayer) that had been purchased for that project, according to one source.

And the two architectures — which IBM had intended to be compatible but due to subtle design differences, were not — became generally available within four months of each other in 2019. IBM continued to maintain two different cloud architectures until earlier this year, according to one source, when the GC effort was scrapped.

Presented with a detailed account of what this story would contain, IBM declined to dispute any of the facts, and sent over the following statement:
We spent more than two years evolving IBM's cloud to be the industry's most secure, enterprise-grade cloud built on a foundation of open source software – offering our clients choice, instead of locking them in. We have integrated key capabilities from across the IBM portfolio – from Software and AI to System Z and Power to our Services offerings. And we continue to invest in our global cloud footprint, making IBM Cloud the right choice for clients in highly regulated industries such as Financial Services, Government, and Telco – where it's essential to balance modernization with data privacy and compliance requirements.

Too late to the game

But by the time IBM finally shipped not one, but two different next-generation cloud infrastructure designs with support for virtual-private cloud technology in 2019, it was too late.

Right around the time the parallel development efforts kicked off, many of IBM's longtime clients in heavily regulated industries like banking had begun to understand how they could operate safely on cloud services, and were looking for options. Buying enterprise technology is a lot like hiring a contractor for a home-improvement job: The only sensible thing to do is get a few bids.

Most major companies considering cloud services in 2017 (and today) would get a bid from AWS, given its leadership position in the market and track record of stability. In most cases, however, they would only get two additional bids: Microsoft and either IBM or Google Cloud.

And it was at this point that IBM Cloud staff began to realize that they had lost the opportunity to win that business, according to sources. When big businesses make an IT decision they're deciding which technology they are going to use for a significant number of years; it can take up to two years just to move complex operations to cloud services, and AWS started encouraging potential customers to sign multiyear contracts in exchange for pricing discounts around this time.

"I think the realization [for IBM] was, do we really want to do this?" Posey said. "Does it really make a whole lot of sense for us to build up all of this infrastructure to be sort of a general-purpose cloud or is there a better way to go?"

IBM Cloud simply wasn't competitive. Genesis was an attempt to move beyond SoftLayer's reputation as a hosting provider for small businesses. But it didn't work, and cost the company years before it rolled out a feature-competitive cloud service with the coveted — but by then table stakes — VPC technology.

There is some small hope for IBM more broadly to cling to in this story, though. One of Krishna's first acts when he took over IBM Cloud in January 2019, before he became CEO, was to end the double-track infrastructure design strategy and get the team to focus on a singular approach going forward, sources said. That gave employees familiar with the overall saga and his leadership confidence that he might yet be able to turn the company around.

But, thanks to years of delays and mismanagement, IBM will never be a major cloud player. It's not entirely clear how committed the company is to its public cloud service, which still has thousands of customers. In the past year it has suffered several major outages that have gone virtually unnoticed by the broader internet community, which is using services built on other clouds.

Sources were evenly divided on the long-term provenance of the group, although a steady decline in IBM's capital expenditures this year does not bode well for a capital-intensive business like cloud computing.

And while it has become clear even to AWS that hybrid and multicloud strategies will be popular for the foreseeable future, which does bode well for Red Hat's software business, cloud computing is growing at around 35% a year and generating enormous profits for its top two contenders.

IBM had everything in place to become a major cloud provider. But technology shifts like cloud computing don't come along every decade, and while IBM has survived every shift in technology since the 1930s, its inability to capitalize on that historic shift was a huge strategic oversight — and one that has left its status as an American technology icon hanging in the balance.

How IBM Public Cloud struggled against AWS and Microsoft - Protocol — The people, power and politics of tech

[TimF] IBM Sues GlobalFoundries for $2.5B Over Wrecked Process Node Transitions By Joe...

TimF — 6/13/2021 12:40:23 PM

IBM Sues GlobalFoundries for $2.5B Over Wrecked Process Node Transitions
By Joel Hruska

IBM has sued GlobalFoundries for its failure to deliver a function 10nm node or the 7nm node that was supposed to replace it. The details in the case date back to 2014, when the two companies signed a deal for GlobalFoundries to build 10nm chips and POWER9 CPUs for IBM. IBM gave GlobalFoundries its Microelectronics division, and GlobalFoundries promised to support IBM for a decade. It was expected that GF would deliver 14nm on time, followed by a transition to 10nm.

Things didn’t go as planned. GlobalFoundries was late delivering 14nm and eventually canceled 10nm development altogether. IBM was apparently willing to work with GlobalFoundries on that issue, and would have accepted the company’s 7nm process as a substitute, had that node come to market. It didn’t. Instead, GlobalFoundries declared it would leave the leading edge and become a second-tier foundry, competing more with companies like UMC and SMIC as opposed to TSMC, Samsung, or Intel.

There’s an amusing quote in IBM’s court filing:

Those representations were an essential precondition to IBM entering into any relationship with GlobalFoundries, as GlobalFoundries had not been a significant player in the High Performance semiconductor business. Only by acquiring IBM’s technology, employees and intellectual property, would GlobalFoundries be able to expand into making High Performance semiconductor chips for IBM and for others.

That’s a bit much. The foundries GF bought — Fabs 9 and 10 — were outdated by the time it purchased them. Fab 9 is a 200mm facility that built 90nm and above chips. Fab 10 is newer, and currently builds 14nm chips with 300mm wafers, but it’s much smaller than the so-called “gigafabs” now deployed by Intel, TSMC, and Samsung. The idea that buying these two buildings was going to somehow rocket GlobalFoundries into a more competitive position doesn’t withstand the sniff test.

What GlobalFoundries needed wasn’t IBM technology. It needed IBM’s business. One of the reasons given for why the company left the leading edge was its inability to land major customers. Ramping up a new node for 1-2 customers isn’t really feasible, especially if the chip volumes are relatively small. AMD had previously stated that it would no longer pay for custom, AMD-specific nodes. This left GlobalFoundries scrambling for customers. Had the company continued working on 7nm it would have benefited from the current semiconductor boom, but rumors at the time suggested GlobalFoundries’ owners were not willing to continue pouring money into a business that had never turned a profit.

Timothy Prickett Morgan at Next Platform has written an excellent story on the case, with a discussion of how the delay impacted the development of POWER9 and POWER10. He also provided a copy of IBM’s filing that wasn’t publicly available. GlobalFoundries’ response can be read here.

IBM’s complaint is straightforward: It signed a deal for 14nm and 10nm CPUs with GlobalFoundries back in 2015. Months later, GlobalFoundries declared it was canceling 10nm, but would offer IBM a 7nm process instead. It failed to do so. IBM declares:

Having taken the 1.5 billion and extracted the benefits of the best-in-class technology, engineers, and intellectual property from IBM, GlobalFoundries revealed that its representations about being committed to High Performance technology were false. GlobalFoundries misled IBM in order to acTuire IBM’s semiconductor business and form an ostensibly mutually beneficial alliance, which GlobalFoundries then deliberately and dishonorably discarded when it suited GlobalFoundries’ purposes.

GlobalFoundries Response

GlobalFoundries’ response to IBM’s accusations of greed boil down to “no u” with a side order of suspicious timing. GF argues that suit has been brought at a time when it is preparing for an IPO. A company with a large lawsuit hanging over its head from IBM might not be valued as highly as it would be otherwise. GF notes that it stopped developing 10nm roughly 6 years ago and stopped developing 7nm approximately three years ago. It writes:

IBM watched GF’s success and the news of the IPO, then seeking a quick payday in the hopes that GF would not defend itself, IBM sent a legal dispute letter from a top tier, expensive white-shoe New York law firm to GF, demanding that it pay an outlandish $2.5 billion in unspecified damages for alleged breaches that, until April 2021, had never been asserted, and without any real explanation as to the basis of its claims… IBM also has a reputation of making licensing requests, at or near, quarter end to meet Wall Street analyst earning expectations and this aggressive move is consistent with that playbook.

GF also claims that it sought to remedy this problem through an agreed-upon, 60-day dispute process, but received no response from IBM. The company seeks a declaration that it did not violate the letter of its agreement with IBM and that the company’s lawsuits are not based on any broken contract. It also argues that IBM is upset that semiconductor demand has spiked some years after it sold its fabs.

There is one seeming point of agreement between the two companies. IBM notes in its suit that GF never intended to become a leading producer of 7nm chips in terms of total volume. GlobalFoundries acknowledges this tacitly when it writes:

IBM quickly found a new, and less expensive, 7nm technology supplier in Samsung. Indeed, the arrangement worked out better for IBM as Samsung, upon information and belief, was able to supply the technology more quickly than GF would have been able to and at significantly less cost to IBM. IBM actually benefitted from GF’s decision to cease working on 7nm technology.

Arguing that your partner benefited from your own inability to build microprocessors is a bold move. We’ll see if it pays off for them.

extremetech.com

[Vitas] i STARTED THIS COMPANY ALONG with WARREN.

Vitas — 4/29/2021 6:49:41 AM

[Figgie] IBM names its managed infrastructure spinoff Kyndryl

Figgie — 4/13/2021 12:08:53 PM

[Glenn Petersen] IBM doubles down on OpenShift Under CEO Arvind Krishna, IBM is in the midst of ...

Glenn Petersen — 3/29/2021 6:44:36 PM

IBM doubles down on OpenShift

Under CEO Arvind Krishna, IBM is in the midst of the biggest transformation in its 109-year history, doubling down on the hybrid cloud and artificial intelligence.

Joe Williams and Tom Kraft
Protocol
March 29, 2021

As part of that overhaul, the company is drawing a new red line. All new products must be built on OpenShift, the company's open-source developer platform it acquired with its $34 billion purchase of Red Hat in 2019.

"We will not build any software in IBM that does not run on OpenShift," SVP Rob Thomas told Protocol. "It's a clear statement of what's important."

The move reflects the company's broader focus on hybrid cloud. And IBM will still have some legacy products that don't run on OpenShift. But it's moved important software like DB2 and WebSphere over to the platform.

"It's a unique play for IBM because … we've got more contributors than anybody in the world from a company perspective on open source," said Thomas.

That mandate is having a broader impact within IBM. The company used to do the majority of its sales directly to customers. Now, it's trying to build out a bigger partner ecosystem.

"We realize we are going to need to be doing half of our revenue through partners or with partners," said Thomas.

One of those is with Palantir, the controversial data analytics firm that's backed by prominent investor and Trump ally Peter Thiel. Under the initiative, Palantir will build its flagship Foundry product on IBM's Cloud Pak for Data, which runs on OpenShift.

AI remains a focus for IBM. And if anything, the OpenShift mandate helps there, since AI and machine learning are among the workloads OpenShift is designed for. The company plans to continue to double down on three keys areas: natural language processing, trust in AI and automation.

"Being the best in those three domains, that has a lot of runway in AI as it's applied to businesses," said Thomas.

Still, there are signs that some of IBM's more ambitious AI projects haven't produced the value the company was hoping. It's reportedly shopping around its Watson Health division for a potential sale, per the WSJ.

The company is also working to translate some of its more high-profile AI research into commercially-viable technology.

IBM's Project Debater, for example, uses semantic understanding to debate humans. Now, it's trying to bring that technology into the enterprise product suite.

IBM still has a lot of work to do. For one, it still hasn't come up with a name for the managed infrastructure business it spun off in 2020. (It's still the cringe-worthy NewCo.) But more deeply, the company has to convince customers that IBM, a company that has struggled to remain relevant in the modern cloud era, can provide the flexibility that larger vendors like AWS can't. That could get harder as the hyperscalers also embrace a multicloud model.

— Joe Williams

Story Link

[Vitas] Lee you are top notch. Personally, I would appreciate if teachers get to educat...

Vitas — 1/10/2021 4:16:57 AM

Lee you are top notch.

Personally, I would appreciate if teachers get to educating.

Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes

[ibyte] Hedging strategies as described give certain patterns in transaction data from s...

ibyte — 10/21/2020 1:07:44 PM

Hedging strategies as described give certain patterns in transaction data from standard pricing formulas, but when the data does not fit those patterns something else is likely happening.

[Lee Lichterman III] Like others already said, probably through the agent IBM uses, of which Computer...

Lee Lichterman III — 10/9/2020 8:52:12 AM

Like others already said, probably through the agent IBM uses, of which ComputerShare is the most common. All I can advise is avoid ComputerShare at all costs! If they transfer everything to them, get them out of the loop as soon as possible. ComputerShare is a pain. If you live in a big city, it's easier but if not.... ComputerShare demands you get a special certification for doing anything. They want a Medallion Signature Guarantee instead of a notary. There are very few of people that hold this certification because it is expensive and has to be renewed more often. I had to drive 200 miles to get one so I could transfer shares to my broker to sell them. None of the banks around me had one and even the ones far away wouldn't do it unless I had an account there despite me offering to pay. For estate planning, do your heirs a favor and make sure you don't leave anything at ComputerShare!!!

[Thehammer] I am just guessing here based on past knowledge, but you may be able to liquidat...

Thehammer — 10/8/2020 10:54:11 PM

I am just guessing here based on past knowledge, but you may be able to liquidate directly through the agent, but they usually charge a fee for that.

Also most brokerage firms charge fees to get a certificate now. If you never plan to sell no big deal.

No one wants to issue certs any more for quite a few reasons. It was considered a big obstacle to shortening the settlement cycle. Certs get lost and often are not correctly endorsed...

You may want to call these guys, but they may have no information on the new company:

A periodic statement of account is provided to the holder of book entry shares, reflecting the number of shares registered in your name and held by Computershare. If you currently hold IBM stock certificates and wish to deposit the shares into book entry with the transfer agent, call Computershare at 888-IBM-6700, or 781-575-2727 for instructions.

[TigerPaw] new shares in book entry form held with transfer agent. Would they have to open ...

TigerPaw — 10/8/2020 10:45:47 PM

new shares in book entry form held with transfer agent.
Would they have to open a new account with some kind of brokerage firm? Had these shares for decades and they were issued directly by IBM in employee purchase plan.

[Thehammer] They may send you a certificate or issue the new shares in book entry form held ...

Thehammer — 10/8/2020 10:36:40 PM

They may send you a certificate or issue the new shares in book entry form held with transfer agent.

[TigerPaw] I'm curious as to what happens when you have certificates in your own name. Wil...

TigerPaw — 10/8/2020 10:25:47 PM

I'm curious as to what happens when you have certificates in your own name. Will you get new certificates ? There is no broker .

[Glenn Petersen] IBM shares surge on plans to spin off infrastructure services unit as a new publ...

Glenn Petersen — 10/8/2020 7:03:48 AM

IBM shares surge on plans to spin off infrastructure services unit as a new public company

PUBLISHED THU, OCT 8 20206:46 AM EDT
UPDATED MOMENTS AGO
Reuters

International Business Machines will separate the managed infrastructure services unit of its global technology services division into a new public company, it said on Thursday.

Shares of IBM jumped 5% in premarket trading on the report.

IBM said it hopes to become more focused on cloud software and solutions through the separation. The spin-off is expected to be tax-free to IBM shareholders, and completed by the end of 2021, the company said.

J.P. Morgan Securities and Lazard are serving as financial advisors for the transaction, with Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison acting as legal advisor.

—CNBC contributed to this report.

This story is developing. Please check back for updates.

cnbc.com

[Lee Lichterman III] It's difficult to tell what intentions are on options. A large put position, esp...

Lee Lichterman III — 10/6/2020 8:25:51 PM

It's difficult to tell what intentions are on options. A large put position, especially out of the money could be bullish if is someone taking a large long position and just buying cheap insurance in case of a negative surprise down the road.
They could be willing to buy at 115 and are just trying to make some easy money so they are selling the puts short hoping not to get assigned but just pocket the time premium. Worst case is if assigned, they buy it 6 bucks plus the premium cheaper than it is now. I do it all the time.
Could also be part of a complex spread where they have multiple strike and duration calls and this is the other side of a straddle/strangle/spread.
No way of knowing unless you're the broker.

[ibyte] Could be. Today the noticeable Put trades were at the June 2021 expiry and were...

ibyte — 10/6/2020 4:08:13 PM

Could be. Today the noticeable Put trades were at the June 2021 expiry and were again pretty negative compared to the stock price and other IBM option trading.

[robert b furman] Support at 115ish. Bob

robert b furman — 10/5/2020 8:46:19 PM

[ibyte] Looking at the option trade data today showed a good number of Put trades that i...

ibyte — 10/5/2020 5:14:47 PM

Looking at the option trade data today showed a good number of Put trades that indicate a downward price move in the next while. Sometimes this data is not wrong.

[robert b furman] Good to see so many solid names posting here. I have begun an initial review of...

robert b furman — 7/8/2020 9:32:58 AM

Good to see so many solid names posting here.

I have begun an initial review of IBM.

I got interested with the Red Hat purchase.

The cloud has confirmed its importance and greater use with the pandemic.

IBM is a small player but may well have a chance to prosper in the faster adaptation that the future brings.

How do posters here feel about the safety of the dividend?

TIA

Bob

IBM acquires RPA company WDG Automation
Jul. 8, 2020 8:34 AM ET|About: International Business Mach... (IBM)|By: Brandy Betz, SA News Editor

IBM (NYSE: IBM) will acquire robotic process automation software company WDG Soluções Em Sistemas E Automação De Processos LTDA for undisclosed terms. The deal is expected to close in Q3.

WDG Automation's tech lets business users create automations using a desktop recorder.

The Brazilian company will help advance IBM's AI-backed automation efforts, including Watson AIOps and Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management.

Related: In May, Microsoft confirmed acquiring robotic process automation company Softomotive to enhance the tech giant's Power Automate platform.

[Glenn Petersen] Nice move today. In a November 2019 cover story about legacy tech companies, Ba...

Glenn Petersen — 1/31/2020 10:27:16 PM

Nice move today.

In a November 2019 cover story about legacy tech companies, Barron’s wrote that IBM “might have the best chance at transforming itself for the cloud era.” The CEO change could kick-start the effort.

IBM Wants to Be the Next Microsoft. It’s Starting With a New CEO.

By Eric J. Savitz
Barron's
Jan. 31, 2020 6:50 pm ET

When Ginni Rometty took over IBM in January 2012, the company was still a major player in the tech world, shaping trends and generating solid returns for investors. As she exits the top job, IBM has lost its edge to major cloud players Microsoft and Amazon.com.

On Thursday afternoon, IBM announced that Rometty was stepping down as CEO, just as Amazon (ticker: AMZN) shares were soaring on earnings results. Big Blue named Arvind Krishna, a 30-year IBM veteran, as her replacement. He’ll become just the 10th CEO in IBM’s 108-year history. In recent years, Krishna has run IBM’s cloud business. The company calls him a “principal architect” of its recent $34 billon Red Hat acquisition, a deal central to IBM’s cloud strategy. IBM also named Red Hat CEO James Whitehurst to the newly created role of IBM president.

With Krishna and Whitehurst, IBM is conceding its mistakes in the cloud. (Under Rometty, IBM sales fell 25% and the stock lost 25% of its value.)

IBM shares rallied more than 4% on the CEO news, probably because the story line seems so familiar.

In 2014, Microsoft (MSFT) named Satya Nadella as CEO, succeeding Steve Ballmer. A 22-year Microsoft veteran, Nadella was running Microsoft’s cloud business prior to the appointment. As CEO, he has led a stunning turnaround. Microsoft shares are up almost fivefold during his tenure.

In Krishna, investors see a potential rerun of the Nadella story, but there’s a long way to go.

Wolfe Research tech strategist Steve Milunovich notes that in January 2013—shortly before Nadella took the CEO job—Microsoft and IBM had the same market value. Today, Microsoft is worth 10 times more than IBM.

Bernstein analyst Toni Sacconaghi has pointed out that Krishna is the first engineer to lead IBM in years. Rometty came from the services business, Sam Palmisano was a sales executive, and Lou Gerstner had a packaged-goods background.

“Given the structural forces at work in the industry—and the importance of cloud—IBM felt it was important—and we agree—to have a technologist as its CEO at this time,” Sacconaghi wrote to clients on Friday.

In a November 2019 cover story about legacy tech companies, Barron’s wrote that IBM “might have the best chance at transforming itself for the cloud era.” The CEO change could kick-start the effort.

But the challenge is significant. Amazon’s blowout fourth-quarter results were powered by 34% growth at its Amazon Web Services cloud unit, which is now operating at an annual run rate of $40 billion. AWS could reach $60 billion in revenue as soon as 2021. Microsoft results were driven by strength at its own cloud segment, known as Azure, which grew 62% in the December quarter.

Milunovich—who recently predicted an imminent CEO change—says the move is bullish for IBM, noting that Krishna and Whitehurst have “cloud and open source cred.”

He’s not convinced that Big Blue can catch up with Amazon and Microsoft, but now, he says, “there is more hope.”

Write to Eric J. Savitz at eric.savitz@barrons.com

barrons.com

[Sr K] New CEO Ginni Rometty is retiring after almost 40 years at IBM and will be succ...

Sr K — 1/30/2020 6:14:14 PM

New CEO

Ginni Rometty is retiring after almost 40 years at IBM and will be succeeded as CEO by Arvind Krishna, who heads the company’s cloud and cognitive-software division.

IBM’s Ginni Rometty Steps Down as CEO

wsj.com

Arvind Krishna, who heads the company’s cloud and cognitive-software division, to succeed her

International Business Machines Corp. said Chief Executive Ginni Rometty is stepping down after a difficult eight-year run at the top of the iconic technology company as she struggled to deliver growth at a time other tech giants’ fortunes blossomed.

[Sr K] WSJ IBM Revenue Lags as Cloud Pivot Remains a Challenge Despite revenue decli...

Sr K — 7/18/2019 2:26:43 AM

WSJ

IBM Revenue Lags as Cloud Pivot Remains a Challenge

Despite revenue decline, profit exceeded Wall Street estimates

IBM said revenue fell 4.2% from a year earlier to $19.16 billion, the fourth consecutive quarterly revenue decline.
PHOTO: CHRIS HELGREN/REUTERS

By

Updated July 17, 2019 7:09 pm ET

IBM International Business Machines Corp. said revenue fell for its fourth straight quarter as it struggles to retool its business for the modern computing age, although Big Blue’s profit grew more than Wall Street had projected.

Revenue fell 4.2% from a year earlier to $19.16 billion. Profit rose 3.9% to $2.5 billion, as the company worked to scale back its exposure to businesses with smaller profit margins.

IBM has trailed Microsoft Corp. and Amazon.com Inc. as customers race to do more of their computing in the cloud—online services that free companies from the need to buy and maintain their own systems. As competitors report consistently strong revenue growth, buoyed by sales of their cloud services, IBM has absorbed a string of declines.

While IBM, led by Chief Executive Ginni Rometty, says its cloud business is growing—cloud revenue climbed by 5% in the second quarter—it is far behind the 41% annual cloud revenue growth Microsoft saw in its latest quarter.

Meanwhile, other parts of IBM’s business are in a gradual decline. Revenue in the company’s IT services division fell by 6.7% year-over-year in the second quarter as the company lost sales from lower-margin equipment it is transitioning away from.

[Sr K] First post in over 7 months. IBM Cuts About 2,000 Jobs Company continues to s...

Sr K — 6/8/2019 8:16:26 AM

First post in over 7 months.

IBM Cuts About 2,000 Jobs

Company continues to shift its business toward ‘high-value segments’

By
Updated June 7, 2019 1:53 p.m. ET

International Business Machines Corp. is cutting about 2,000 jobs in a round of layoffs this week, according to a person familiar with the matter, as the technology giant works to reshape its business.

“We are continuing to reposition our team to align with our focus on the high-value segments of the IT market, and we also continue to hire aggressively in critical new areas that deliver value for our clients and IBM,” a company representative said in a statement.

[TigerPaw] IBM had a good Unix offering with it's Power Systems division and AIX. Ginni c...

TigerPaw — 10/31/2018 1:45:04 PM

IBM had a good Unix offering with it's Power Systems division and AIX. Ginni chose to cut off all investment in that technology in order to buy back stock at the highest of prices. Now AIX is just a caretaker group fixing requests for the few, mostly government, customers they have left. No resources to connect AIX to their cloud, or AI, or anything else they think is important to the future. Instead they pay top dollar for the same technology they could have had in house.

Rometty told CNBC that the deal should not be interpreted as part of any plan for her to transition out of her position as CEO at IBM.

Now that's a scary Halloween message.

[Julius Wong] Analyst Ratings & Price Targets tipranks.com

Julius Wong — 10/29/2018 9:08:08 PM

[Sr K] Red Hat is already offered on AWS. aws.amazon.com What is the breakup fee? Ama...

Sr K — 10/29/2018 1:47:26 AM

Red Hat is already offered on AWS.

aws.amazon.com

What is the breakup fee? Amazon usually would make an offer to at least drive the price up or get the target.

They might stand aside, but Alphabet or Microsoft could also offer more than the first bid.

I don't see who else is a big user or wants to be transformative. There should be a go shop period before knowing this deal is a knock out offer.

edit
The acquisition, which has been approved by the boards of both IBM and Red Hat, is expected to close in the latter half of 2019.

[Sr K] Bloomberg headlines this as IBM Chases Amazon Into Cloud With $33 Billion Red H...

Sr K — 10/29/2018 1:28:51 AM

Bloomberg headlines this as

IBM Chases Amazon Into Cloud With $33 Billion Red Hat Purchase

[Glenn Petersen] IBM to acquire Red Hat in deal valued at $34 billion IBM announced plans to acqu...

Glenn Petersen — 10/28/2018 8:54:38 PM

IBM to acquire Red Hat in deal valued at $34 billion

IBM announced plans to acquire Red Hat in a deal valued at about $34 billion.
Prior to the acquisition, Red Hat's market capitalization stood at approximately $20.5 billion.
The acquisition is by far IBM's largest deal ever, and the third-biggest in the history of U.S. tech.

Alex Sherman | Lora Kolodny
Published 6 Hours Ago Updated 18 Mins Ago CNBC.com

Getty Images
IBM Chairman, President and CEO Ginni Rometty arrives for her keynote address at CES 2016 January 6, 2016 in Las Vegas.
-------------------------------------

IBM is acquiring Red Hat, a major distributor of open-source software and technology, in a deal valued around $34 billion, the companies announced on Sunday.

According to a joint statement, IBM will pay cash to buy all shares in Red Hat at $190 each. Shares in Red Hat closed at $116.68 on Friday before the deal was announced.

The open source, enterprise software maker will become a unit of IBM's Hybrid Cloud division, with Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst joining IBM's senior management team and reporting to CEO Ginni Rometty.

Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan and Lazard advised IBM on the Red Hat deal. Morgan Stanley and Guggenheim advised Red Hat.

The acquisition is by far IBM's largest deal ever, and the third-biggest in the history of U.S. tech. Excluding the AOL-Time Warner merger, the only larger deals were the $67 billion merger between Dell and EMC in 2016 and JDS Uniphase's $41 billion acquisition of optical-component supplier SDL in 2000, just as the dot-com bubble was bursting.

Red Hat started 25 years ago as a distributor of a particular flavor of Linux, an open-source operating system that is commonly used in server computers that power company data centers. Today, Red Hat is known for distributing and supporting Red Hat Enterprise Linux, as well as other technologies commonly used in data centers. The company, which went public at the peak of the dot-com boom in 1999, earned $259 million on revenue of $2.92 billion in its last fiscal year, which ended Feb. 28. Its revenue grew 21% between the 2017 and 2018 fiscal years.

Rometty told CNBC that the deal should not be interpreted as part of any plan for her to transition out of her position as CEO at IBM.

"I'm still young and I'm not going anywhere," she told CNBC.

IBM will pause share repurchases in 2020 and 2021, but won't touch its dividend. The pause is a cautionary measure as the company plans on returning to its normal leverage ratio in about two years.

Open source has been the biggest theme in technology this year. Prior to IBM's purchase of Red Hat, two of the biggest tech deals of the year were Microsoft's $7.5 billion purchase of GitHub, a code-sharing service, and Salesforce's $6.5 billion acquisition of MuleSoft, whose technology stitches together disparate software applications, data and devices. Earlier this month, big-data rivals Cloudera and Hortonworks agreed to merge in a $5.2 billion deal.

Both Rometty and Whitehurst, in comments to CNBC, agreed that Microsoft's purchase of GitHub was "irrelevant" to IBM and Red Hat's decision to enter into a deal.

While Red Hat has talked for years about potentially selling itself to other companies, including Google, never has anything gotten nearly as serious as the negotiations with IBM, according to people familiar with the matter.

"We were not looking to do something," Whitehurst told CNBC.

IBM reported lighter-than-expected revenue in its most recent earnings update, and its revenues shrank from the previous year after three quarters of growth. Prior to that brief growth period, the company's revenues had been slowly declining for about five years.

The company has been working to catch up to Amazon and Microsoft in the cloud infrastructure business.

Cloud is one of IBM's four key strategic imperatives, or growth drivers -- the others are social, mobile and analytics -- and in the quarter, IBM announced cloud deals with Economical Insurance, ExxonMobil and Novis.

IBM and Red Hat said the deal would enable businesses to do even more work in the cloud, keeping their apps and data portable and secure, no matter which cloud or hybrid technologies they adopt.

--CNBC's David Faber , Ari Levy and Jordan Novet contributed to this report.

cnbc.com

[Sr K] IBM seeks $167 million from Groupon in dispute over early internet patents [gra...

Sr K — 7/17/2018 6:17:34 AM

IBM seeks $167 million from Groupon in dispute over early internet patents

July 16, 2018

By Jan Wolfe

WILMINGTON, Del. (Reuters) - International Business Machines Corp on Monday asked a U.S. jury to award it $167 million in a lawsuit accusing e-commerce marketplace operator Groupon Inc of using patented technology without authorization.

IBM lawyer John Desmarais told a jury in federal court in Delaware that Groupon infringed patents describing foundational e-commerce technology that had already been licensed to Amazon Inc, Facebook Inc and Alphabet Inc's Google for between $20 million and $50 million per company.

"Most big companies have taken licenses to these patents," Desmarais said. "Groupon has not. The new kid on the block refuses to take responsibility for using these inventions."

Groupon lawyer J. David Hadden argued that IBM was overreading the scope of its patents and claiming ownership of building blocks of the internet.

"A key question for you in this case is whether these patents cover the world wide web," Hadden told jurors. "They do not and that is because IBM did not invent the world wide web."

An IBM executive is expected to testify during the two-week trial about licensing deals with technology companies like Amazon and Google, providing a rare glimpse into IBM's efforts to derive revenue from its large patent portfolio.

The Armonk, New York-based company invests heavily in research and development and has secured more U.S. patents than any other company for the past 25 years.

IBM sued Chicago-based Groupon in 2016, alleging infringement of four patents.

Two of the four patents at issue relate to Prodigy, a late-1980s forerunner to the internet, developed by IBM and others, that describe a system for showing applications and advertisements that reduces server loads.

IBM also said it patented so-called "single sign on" technology that allows consumers to log in to a retailer's website with their Facebook or Google account.

Desmarais told jurors IBM is a prolific innovator and seeks to license its patents on reasonable terms. IBM had no choice but to sue Groupon after it refused to negotiate a licensing deal, he said.

Hadden countered IBM was unreasonably seeking money from every significant internet company.

"We are here because IBM has another business that IBM does not talk about in its commercials," he said. "In that business IBM uses its huge stock of patents as a club to get money from other companies."

[Julius Wong] U.S. Says It Reclaimed Supercomputer Crown From China IBM computer is the world...

Julius Wong — 6/8/2018 1:42:49 PM

U.S. Says It Reclaimed Supercomputer Crown From China

IBM computer is the world’s fastest, according to Energy Department

wsj.com

[isabel131] My mistake, HG8245Q2 only has one 1USB, and HS8546V has 2USB

isabel131 — 3/22/2018 12:01:08 AM

[isabel131] They both have 4GE+1POTS+1*USB+2.4G/5G WIFI, but HS8546V is with China mobile...

isabel131 — 3/21/2018 11:42:30 PM

They both have 4*GE+1*POTS+1*USB+2.4G/5G WIFI, but HS8546V is with China mobile logo while HG8245Q2 is with Huawei logo.

[Glenn Petersen] h/t FUHBO IBM’s latest computer is a blockchain-ready CPU smaller than a grain ...

Glenn Petersen — 3/21/2018 3:46:33 PM

h/t FUHBO

IBM’s latest computer is a blockchain-ready CPU smaller than a grain of salt

digitaltrends.com

IBM
--------------------------------------------------

IBM kicked off its Think 2018 conference today with a bombshell announcement: It has made the world’s smallest computer, and it’s designed from the ground up to work with the blockchain. The computer itself is smaller than a single grain of salt, coming in at 1 millimeter by 1 millimeter and reportedly has about the same computing power as a 1990s era CPU.

“The world’s smallest computer is an IBM-designed edge device architecture and computing platform that is smaller than a grain of salt will cost less than ten cents to manufacture, and can monitor, analyze, communicate, and even act on data,” IBM claims. “It packs several hundred thousand transistors into a footprint barely visible to the human eye and can help verify that a product has been handled properly throughout its long journey.”

Impressive as it is, for its size, it’s not the kind of chip you’re going to see in a mobile device any time soon, it’s made for something a little different. These microscopic CPUs are designed to be disposable. They’ll spend their lifetimes stuck to products in transit to ensure they arrive where they need to without being tampered with.

“Within the next five years, cryptographic anchors — such as ink dots or tiny computers smaller than a grain of salt — will be embedded in everyday objects and devices,” says IBM’s Arvind Krishna. “They’ll be used in tandem with blockchain’s distributed ledger technology to ensure an object’s authenticity from its point of origin to when it reaches the hands of the customer.”

IBM
-------------------------------------------

Essentially, these CPUs will be embedded in tags or product packaging, and they’ll log every movement the product makes, from shipment to delivery. They could also be used to ensure the authenticity of luxury goods.

“These technologies pave the way for new solutions that tackle food safety, authenticity of manufactured components, genetically modified products, identification of counterfeit objects, and provenance of luxury goods,” Krishna continues.

So, it’s fair to say the breakthrough here isn’t just the size of these computers, it’s their potential use. Think of them like the bar codes on items in the grocery store. But instead of communicating price info, these CPUs could tell you everything about the product — where it was made, by whom, and where it’s been.

[TigerPaw] I think .... Huawei HS8546V accepts a cat6 cable input Huawei HG8245Q2 accep...

TigerPaw — 3/20/2018 6:19:39 AM

I think ....

Huawei HS8546V accepts a cat6 cable input

Huawei HG8245Q2 accepts a fiber optic input

[isabel131] What's the difference between Huawei HS8546V and HG8245Q2?

isabel131 — 3/19/2018 10:16:04 PM

[Glenn Petersen] IBM’s year-over-year revenue didn’t decline in the last quarter by Frederic La...

Glenn Petersen — 1/19/2018 9:57:35 AM

IBM’s year-over-year revenue didn’t decline in the last quarter

by Frederic Lardinois ( @fredericl)
TechCrunch
January 18, 2018

Here’s a surprise: After 22 quarters of consecutive year-over-year revenue declines, IBM today reported that its revenue increased from Q4 2016 to Q4 2017. The company reported revenue of $22.5 billion for the last quarter, up from $21.77 billion a year ago. Earnings per share came in at $5.18. Analysts expected revenue of about $22.06 billion and earnings per share of $5.17.

What’s the reason for this unexpected turnaround? IBM’s executives argue that the company’s turnaround plans are starting to make a dent in their bottom line. “Our strategic imperatives revenue again grew at a double-digit rate and now represents 46 percent of our total revenue, and we are pleased with our overall revenue growth in the quarter,” said Ginni Rometty, IBM chairman, president and chief executive officer in today’s announcement. “During 2017, we strengthened our position as the leading enterprise cloud provider and established IBM as the blockchain leader for business. Looking ahead, we are uniquely positioned to help clients use data and AI to build smarter businesses.”

Whether this is a sign of a long-term return to growth at IBM remains to be seen, but it’s surely a hopeful sign for the company.

Virtually all IBM business units reported increased revenues, including 32 percent growth in the “Systems” unit, which includes hardware and operating systems software — and which interestingly was an area where IBM definitely struggled in the past, though its z Systems and storage line is showing some clear growth now.

IBM’s hybrid cloud services, as well as security and mobile service, which fall under the “Technology Services & Cloud Platforms” segment, saw 15 percent growth in the last quarter, even as the overall segment saw a 1 percent drop in revenue, to $9.2 billion.

The company also notes that it took a $5.5 billion charge because of the enactment of the U.S.’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. IBM’s GAAP tax rate, including this one-time charge, was 124 percent for Q4 and 49 percent for the full year. That’s not unexpected, but it may hurt the company as it’s looking to grow its revenue over the next few quarters.

techcrunch.com

[Cogito Ergo Sum] A lot of layers of middlemen will be (could be ??) eliminated it appears.. Event...

Cogito Ergo Sum — 1/16/2018 11:07:14 AM

A lot of layers of middlemen will be (could be ??) eliminated it appears.. Eventually could also be good for cost/prices

[Glenn Petersen] IBM has poured a lot of time and money into blockchain development. They will be...

Glenn Petersen — 1/16/2018 10:25:25 AM

IBM has poured a lot of time and money into blockchain development. They will be a significant participant in the space.

IBM and Maersk have been collaborating on creating a blockchain platform for the global supply chain. Now the duo will create a new company to commercialize the platform broadly.

Message 31437434

[Glenn Petersen] Chicago traffic is just as bad. The future will be better: [youtube video] No ...

Glenn Petersen — 12/10/2017 9:55:30 PM

Chicago traffic is just as bad. The future will be better:

No chickens or snakes were harmed in the making of the above video.

A Single Autonomous Car Has a Huge Impact on Alleviating Traffic

Even intelligent cruise control systems could be used to clear up congestion.

by Jamie Condliffe
MIT Technology
May 10, 2017

It’s sometimes argued that the long-term benefits of self-driving cars, such as safer roads, may not be felt with much impact until robotic vehicles account for the majority of traffic on the road. Until that happens, those unpredictable lumps of meat we call humans will continue to exert their own effects on traffic—continuing to cause accidents, for instance. But a new study out of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign suggests that the addition of just a small number of autonomous cars can ease the congestion on our roads.

You’ve likely seen the demonstration of phantom traffic jams where cars drive around in a circle to simulate the impact of a single slowing car on a road full of traffic. One car pumps its brakes for no particular reason, and the slowdown ripples through the traffic. Now, the University of Illinois research, led by Daniel Work, shows that placing even just a single autonomous car into one of those circular traffic simulations can dampen the effects of the phantom traffic jam.

The team’s results show that by having an autonomous vehicle control its speed intelligently when a phantom jam starts to propagate, it’s possible to reduce the amount of braking performed further back down the line. The numbers are impressive: the presence of just one autonomous car reduces the standard deviation in speed of all the cars in the jam by around 50 percent, and the number of sharp hits to the brakes is cut from around nine per vehicle for every kilometer traveled to at most 2.5—and sometimes practically zero.

Because fuel use increases when when cars slow down and have to get back up to speed, the presence of the autonomous vehicle also reduces fuel consumption. According to the calculations by the team, in fact, the savings is as much as 40 percent when averaged across all the cars in the traffic flow.

It’s interesting that these improvements can occur even with a single vehicle in a flow of 20 other cars. And it’s also worth noting that the level of autonomy required to have this effect isn’t the kind that Waymo, Uber, and others are seeking to build—it’s more akin to the adaptive cruise control already featured in many higher-end cars. So while we might have to wait a little longer for all of autonomy’s effects to be felt, its ability to reduce traffic congestion could be here rather sooner than we anticipated.

technologyreview.com

[Cogito Ergo Sum] I wonder at that.. Traffic light control in toronto is notoriously bad. At times...

Cogito Ergo Sum — 12/10/2017 12:58:06 PM

I wonder at that.. Traffic light control in toronto is notoriously bad. At times it is the cause of slowdowns..

Few years back it was admitted that slowing traffic was the priority.. The traffic reports disguise it as 'volume'

[Glenn Petersen] Watson should figure out how to get traffic through cities more efficiently. Si...

Glenn Petersen — 12/10/2017 12:41:29 PM

Watson should figure out how to get traffic through cities more efficiently.

Simple. Autonomous vehicles directed by Watson or a comparable AI platform.

Subject 59296

[hollyhunter] Third-quarter results came in above Wall Street's targets, and management expect...

hollyhunter — 10/18/2017 8:19:25 PM

Third-quarter results came in above Wall Street's targets, and management expects a return to earnings growth in the next quarter. On watch for clear above 161.23.

[Sr K] Oct 17, 2017 Q3 2017 reporting from page 5 of the prepared remarks: Our operat...

Sr K — 10/18/2017 2:15:10 AM

Oct 17, 2017
Q3 2017 reporting

from page 5 of the prepared remarks:

Our operating expense was down one percent versus last year, with little impact from currency and acquisitions this quarter. Our expense dynamics reflect the continued efficiency we’re driving in our underlying spending base, while continuing to invest to build and reinvent our platforms and solutions. Included within the one percent reduction, we had about $220 million less IP income year to year, and absorbed an impact of about $100 million year to year in SG&A associated with some commercial disputes.

from page 8:

We’re embedding cognitive into our Security offerings as well. Security software grew double digits this quarter, and this is clearly a hot market for us. We had strong growth across our security portfolio in areas such as endpoint protection, incident response and security intelligence, with offerings like Resilient and QRadar. Our clients using QRadar Advisor with Watson are seeing measurable results. For example, clients found threats 60 times faster than manual investigations, and complex analysis went from an hour to less than a minute. As you would imagine, nothing matters more than time in these situations. Acceleration in the number of cyber security threats, the increasing requirements of regulatory compliance, including the upcoming GDPR, or General Data Protection Regulation, and our collaboration with Cisco and other partners on threat intelligence drove strong demand this quarter.

and, a few pages later:

IBM Z revenue grew 62 percent year to year on 33 percent MIPS growth, and margins expanded after a successful launch of the z14 program in mid- September. This success is due to the strong demand for technology that helps address the growing threat of global data breaches, and the need to operate within regulated environments. Our new z14 mainframe, with its unprecedented encryption capabilities, encrypts all data associated with any application, cloud service or database all the time, without the possibility of human intervention. And that’s with no application change, and no performance impact. So, the appeal is obvious, and we had good traction across a broad mix of industries and geographies. And across the z platform, we are addressing emerging workloads in areas like Blockchain, machine learning, and new payment systems. For example, when banks are trying to figure out how to manage new requirements within the EU’s payment modernization initiative, they come to us. Given the critical nature of the European financial services backbone, IBM Z provides the necessary reliability, scalability and security, and that’s why we had key wins in instant payments this quarter.

[louisaricci] The IBM's Q1 revenues for 2017 fell short of expectations, reporting a bigger t...

louisaricci — 9/19/2017 9:30:28 PM

The IBM's Q1 revenues for 2017 fell short of expectations, reporting a bigger that expected decline for the first time in five quarters.

[TigerPaw] Watson should figure out how to get traffic through cities more efficiently.

TigerPaw — 9/8/2017 8:43:40 PM

[Glenn Petersen] IBM and MIT pen 10-year, $240M AI research partnership by Ron Miller ( @ron_...

Glenn Petersen — 9/7/2017 10:56:19 PM

IBM and MIT pen 10-year, $240M AI research partnership

by Ron Miller ( @ron_miller)
TechCrunch
September 6, 2017

IBM and MIT came together today to sign a 10-year, $240 million partnership agreement that establishes the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab at the prestigious Cambridge, MA academic institution.

The lab will be co-chaired by Dario Gil, IBM Research VP of AI and Anantha P. Chandrakasan, dean of MIT’s School of Engineering.

Big Blue intends to invest $240 million into the lab where IBM researchers and MIT students and faculty will work side by side to conduct advanced AI research. As to what happens to the IP that the partnership produces, the sides were a bit murky about that.

This much we know: MIT plans to publish papers related to the research, while the two parties plan to open source a good part of the code. Some of the IP will end up inside IBM products and services. MIT hopes to generate some AI-based startups as part of the deal too.

“The core mission of joint lab is to bring together MIT scientists and IBM [researchers] to shape the future of AI and push the frontiers of science,” IBM’s Gil told TechCrunch.

To that end, the two parties plan to put out requests to IBM scientists and the MIT student community to submit ideas for joint research. To narrow the focus of what could be a broad endeavor, they have established a number of principles to guide the research.

This includes developing AI algorithms with goal of getting beyond specific applications for neural-based deep learning networks and finding more generalized ways to solve complex problems in the enterprise.

Secondly, they hope to harness the power of machine learning with quantum computing, an area that IBM is working hard to develop right now. There is tremendous potential for AI to drive the development of quantum computing and conversely for quantum computing and the computing power it brings to drive the development of AI.

With IBM’s Watson Security and Healthcare divisions located right down the street from MIT in Kendall Square, the two parties have agreed to concentrate on these two industry verticals in their work. Finally, the two teams plan to work together to help understand the social and economic impact of AI in society, which as we have seen has already proven to be considerable.

While this is a big deal for both MIT and IBM, Chandrakasan made clear that the lab is but one piece of a broader campus-wide AI initiative. Still, the two sides hope the new partnership will eventually yield a number of research and commercial breakthroughs that will lead to new businesses both inside IBM and in the Massachusetts startup community, particularly in the healthcare and cybersecurity areas.

techcrunch.com