6 ms·

This is a serious question. What does IBM, in fact, do? I'm surprised they are still around and apparently relevant. Are they more or less a services and consul

This is a serious question. What does IBM, in fact, do? I'm surprised they are still around and apparently relevant. Are they more or less a services and consulting company now?

fock 6mo ago
They sell (managed) database appliances (on z and Power) and associated software (think the platform/HANA parts of SAP) - all state-of-the-art in the late 1990s but since then put on maintenance mode and it shows (a bit like oracle...). Their hardware is still cool custom built silicon and imo state of the art, but since k8s, high-speed-network and multi-TB-machines (for <100k$) are here and run Linux no new venture buys into that anymore (except for gulf states...). Before, when the competition was a cluster of Itanium/VMS or Sparc/Solaris and the associated contract, noone bought into that either at scale but also noone using IBM had a very compelling reason to switch everything around. So essentially they sell new hardware and "support" to customers who have been in need to process tabular, multi-GB databases since when a PC was 128MB memory and have been doing electronic record-keeping since the 1970s. They also allow their ~hostages~, ehm, customers who trust them with their data to run processing near the data at a cost/in a cloud style billing model. That is so expensive though that every large IBM-shop has built an elaborate layer of JVMs, Unix and mirror-databases around their IBM appliances. Lately they bought Redhat and hashicorp and confluent thus taking a cut from the "support" of the abominiations of IT systems they helped birth for some more time to come (also remember the alternative JVM OpenJ9, do you all?). I think the later a company started using centralized electronic record keeping, the higher the likelyhood they are not paying IBM anymore: commercial banks, governments and insurance started digitizing in the 60s (with custom software) and if the companies are old (or in US-friendly petrostates) they are all IBM customers. Corps using ERP or PLM offerings (so manufacturing and retail chains which are younger than banks) used to start digitizing a little later (Walmart only was founded in the 60s and electronic CAD started in the 80s) and while they likely used IBM in the past (SAP was big on DB2) they might not use it anymore (also it helps they usually bought the ERP or PLM from someone else). New Companies whose sole business was to run a digital-platform started on Unix (see Amazon who successfully fought to ditch Oracle even) or just built their whole platform (Google). If those companies predate Unix they usually fought hard to get rid of IBM (Microsoft, Amadeus) Consulting/outsourcing services have been spun out to Kyndryl, so nowadays IBM only sells hardware, support for their products and ostensibly has some people left to develop their products... The days when that was a big thing and IBM produced all the stuff they sell support for now, have been long gone. A fun link to see how their "product development" operates nowadays is this discussion to bring gitlab-runners to z/OS: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-runner/-/work_items/27526 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-runner/-/work_items/275... - tl;dr "hey you opensource company, we are IBM and managed to pay someone to port a go compiler to z/OS. Now we have a customer who wants to use gitlab with z/OS. Would you like to make your software part of our product offering?". A fun fact is that - even within IBM - access to the real mainframe seems to be very limited which shows a bit in the discussion linked above and also with an ex-Kyndryl-person saying: "oh, I once had a contract where we replaced the mainframe and we ran that on Linux-boxes inside IBM, because it was just cheaper that way. Just the big reporting was a bit slow, but the reliability was just fine"
dogma1138 6mo ago
Mainframes and consulting.
p-e-w 6mo ago
I was shocked when IBM acquired Red Hat a few years ago. I had silently assumed at the time that Red Hat was far bigger than IBM nowadays, so the reverse would have made more sense to me.
- freedomben 6mo ago
  Google was apparently in the running for acquiring Red Hat. I still wonder what Red Hat would be today if Google had acquired instead.
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
  - mghackerlady 6mo ago
    much, much worse
    - freedomben 6mo ago
      Yes I agree, given the direction G has been going. I was disappointed at the time, but it was probably a blessing in disguise
      - mghackerlady 6mo ago
        honestly I think it's a net positive (for me at least) because it ensures Fedora has great POWER support (I'll never be able to afford a POWER machine at this rate, but the architecture is an absolute pleasure to work with whenever I have to)
Frieren 6mo ago
IBM has more revenue than Oracle even if we hear way less about it. 5 times smaller than Apple, thou. It also has more employees than Microsoft or Alphabet. But it has tighter profit margins than other tech companies. IBM is not in consumer products nor services so we do not hear about it.
- lotsofpulp 6mo ago
  Oracle/TSMC/SpaceX isn’t in consumer products/services, but they are heard about. IBM was declining for 10 years while the rest of the tech related businesses were blowing up, plus IBM does not pay well, so other than it being a business in decline, there wasn’t much to talk about. No one expects anything new from IBM. Also, they had quite a few big boondoggles where they were the bad guys helping swindle taxpayers due to the goodwill from their brand’s legacy, so being a dying rent seeking business as opposed to a growing innovative business was the assumption I had.
  - hsbauauvhabzb 6mo ago
    They also helped the nazis
  - freedomben 6mo ago
    SpaceX is pretty heavily in consumer products/services now that Starlink is big. But otherwise yes you are correct.
- gpapilion 6mo ago
  It’s a very different company post the PwC purchase. They have around 1/3 of the revenue from consulting which tends to push the valuation down due to its relative low margin when compared to software. This also inflates the number of employees.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
ghaff 6mo ago
So they had $30 billion in software revenue last year and $15 billion in infrastructure against $20 billion in consulting.
lmpdev 6mo ago
I was surprised to find out they still have hardware repair technicians (extremely expensive but reliable: ~$400 per computer around 2022 iirc) But yes they’re mostly enterprise/services/mainframes not anything overly consumer
- quietsegfault 6mo ago
  No, IBM has Unisys contractors, not employees. All the techs I’ve worked with from IBM have been a nightmare. One dropped an entire drive array on the ground, and tried to install it despite it being bent and no longer fitting on the rack. I have been acquired by IBM twice. They are a nightmare, horrible company.
  - stonogo 6mo ago
    IBM has plenty of hardware techs. They're called system services representatives (SSRs) and if you got a Unisys contractor, that just means you're not spending enough money for IBM to send an SSR.
bargainbin 6mo ago
I work for a big international corp. We pay IBM a blankest sum annually because it’s that hard to quantify just how much we rely on their services and licensing costs. Licensing of course just being typical rent seeking behaviour but their services are valuable given the financial impact if one of their solutions goes down on us (which is very rarely)
dgellow 6mo ago
When you’re that large and established it’s very hard to die. I expect IBM to exist in some form pretty much forever
shrimppersimmon 6mo ago
They design and build not one but two CPU architectures, s390/Z and POWER. Both have been around for many years, but neither is obsolete, they're just not designed for consumer applications. They still generate $10-15 billion per year in revenue.
- eru 6mo ago
  Power was used in customer applications a long time ago? I think Apple used them for a while and so did some game consoles?
  - kstrauser 6mo ago
    Sort of, in the form of PowerPC, which was an Apple-IBM-Motorola (“AIM”) collaboration. It’s closely related to IBM’s Power line, but more like a predecessor than a sibling.
    - dcrazy 6mo ago
      Wasn’t PowerPC cut down from POWER?
  - shrimppersimmon 6mo ago
    Yes. Apple used PowerPC, and PowerPC was also in the Xbox 360, PS3, Wii, and Wii U. It was also widespread in embedded sectors like networking, automotive, and aerospace. IBM eventually stepped away from the embedded market and eventually lost their foothold in consoles as well. While Raptor did offer Power9 systems at a somewhat accessible price point, the IBM-produced CPUs were still fundamentally enterprise-grade hardware, meaning they retained the high costs and "big iron" features of server tech.
    - mghackerlady 6mo ago
      What I wouldn't give for raptor money... they've gotten more and more expensive as time went on
- 6mo ago
jeswin 6mo ago
They design their own CPUs, and they sold $15b of hardware last year. Tellum ii in the z17 mainframe is a Samsung 5nm part. What I don't get however is who'd use their custom accelerators for AI inference.
- eru 6mo ago
  Anyone who can't get any better AI accelerators elsewhere? Last I heard, these things were sold out for years on end. And anyone who can make one, can sell them.
quietsegfault 6mo ago
They exist to swallow up profitable companies, extract any “unnecessary” overhead (like benefits, PTO, pay that isn’t rock bottom), and package into large enterprise licensing agreements.
- eru 6mo ago
  Sounds like a pretty good deal for those people who keep starting these 'profitable' companies. If IBM runs them into the ground, there's a niche for a copy-cat of the original company that you can just found again. Rinse and repeat.
Cthulhu_ 6mo ago
A better question would probably what they don't do; just going off the wiki page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM) for recent history, they're in health care (imaging), weather, video streaming, cloud services, Red Hat, managed infrastructure (which branched off into a company called Kyndryl, which has 90.000 employees in 115 countries), warfare ("In June 2025, IBM was named by a UN expert report as one of several companies "central to Israel's surveillance apparatus and the ongoing Gaza destruction.""), etc etc etc. Basically they do a lot, but they're not showy about it.
- pezezin 6mo ago
  > warfare ("In June 2025, IBM was named by a UN expert report as one of several companies "central to Israel's surveillance apparatus and the ongoing Gaza destruction."") It is not the first time IBM does that...
pjmlp 6mo ago
Own Red-Hat, thus major contributions to Wayland, GNOME, GCC and Java, at very least. Have their own Java implementation, with capabilities like AOT before OpenJDK got started on Leyden, or even Graal existed, for years had extensions for value types (nowadays dropped), and alongside Azul, cluster based JIT compiler that shares code across JVM instances. IBM i and z/OS are still heavely deployed in many organisations, alongside Aix, and LinuxONE (Linux running on mainframes and micros). Research in quantum computing, AI, design processes, one of the companies that does huge amounts of patents per year across various fields. And yes a services company, that is actually a consortium of IBM owned companies many of each under a different brand (which is followed by "an IBM company").
- progmetaldev 6mo ago
  I think a large number of people seem to forget the trust that companies have built on IBM over decades. The mainframe market is IBM, where IBM already had a hold. People want to believe that dropping such a large company could be done with a rewrite, but as long as IBM is there to support what they already have in place, it makes it unlikely for companies to move away. Obviously a team that has experience moving away from IBM technology to something more "modern" could go with another platform running on different hardware, but you don't hear about those migrations too much because they are rare (for a reason, IBM also offers support that companies love to cling on to). I don't blame companies that already tied up in IBM tech for sticking with what they already have. As boring and dated as IBM tech might be, it's still running a ton of infrastructure, and you don't get to be that kind of company without being solid and reliable. That's what companies want, even if a development team wants to flex their skills in something new and not tied to IBM.
roncesvalles 6mo ago
Putting consumer grade (aka "commodity") hardware in a datacenter and running your infra on it is a bit of a meme, in the sense that it's not the only way of doing things. It was probably pioneered/popularized by Google but that's because writing great software was their "hammer", ie they framed every computing problem as a software problem. It was probably easier for them (= Jeff Dean) to take mediocre hardware and write a robust distributed system on top instead of the other way around. There is, however, a completely different vision for how web infrastructure should be and that is to have extremely resilient hardware and simple software. That's what a mainframe is. You can write a simple and easy to maintain single process backend program, run it on a mainframe and be fairly confident that it can run without stopping for decades. Everything from the power supply to the CPU is redundant and can be hot swapped without booting the OS. Credit card transactions and banking software run on this model for example (just think about how insanely reliable credit card transactions are). IBM has a monopoly in the second world. You could say the entire field of distributed systems is one big indie effort to break free of IBM's monopoly on computing.
- Nursie 6mo ago
  > Credit card transactions and banking software run on this model for example Eh, they can but even a couple of decades ago there was a shift to open platforms. 90s and early 00s, sure, it was mainframe and exotic x86 species like Stratus machines. But even then the power of “throw a ton of cheaper Unix at it” was winning. Banks’ central systems maybe, I have less experience there. IBM did also try for a while to ride the Linux virtualisation wave as well, saying “hey, you can run thousands of Linux instances on a single mainframe”, and I did some work porting IBM software to s390 Linux around 2007.
  - mghackerlady 6mo ago
    x86 servers weren't that common in the 90s and early 200s, that was all sun or the other commercial unix peoples things
    - greedo 6mo ago
itake 6mo ago
I own their shares due to their Quantum Computing group You can see their roadmap here: https://www.ibm.com/roadmaps/ https://www.ibm.com/roadmaps/
phrotoma 6mo ago
Early in my career I spent some years working at the biggest bank in Canada, they were (and still are) an enormous IBM customer. Hardware, software, consulting, and probably lots of other things I had no visibility into. Beneath the countless layers of VMs and copious weird purpose built gear like Tandem and Base24 for the ATMs was a whole bunch of true blue z/OS powered IBM mainframes chugging through thousands and thousands of interlocking COBOL programs that do everything from moving files between partner banks all over the world, moving money between accounts, compounding interest, and extracting a metric shitton of every type of fee imaginable. If you know z/OS there's work available until your retirement. Miserable, pointless, banal, and archaic legacy as fuck mainframe work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tandem_Computers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tandem_Computers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASE24 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASE24 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z/OS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z/OS
- parthdesai 6mo ago
  I don't how exaggerated this story is, but one of my buddies did his internship at TD. One of his skip managers told him if you know COBOL there are departments that will give you a blank cheque during salary ngotiation.
  - phrotoma 6mo ago
    Yeah it's hard to say but I believe there's at least some truth to that. I took COBOL off my resume over a decade ago just to combat the volume of recruiters trying to drag me away from the cloud back to on-prem land. A good friend of mine who worked on a CICS based credit card processing application at that bank doubled his salary twice inside of 4 yrs. First by quitting the bank and going to a boutique consultancy to build competing software (which they sold to other banks) and then by quitting that job and coming back to the bank to takeover the abysmal state the CICS app had lapsed into in his absence. And that was circa 2010. One thing that was true of the bank then and I'm sure is true now is that when they see a nail they truly have just the one hammer. When a problem comes along, hit it with a huge sack of cash until it goes away.
  - vbezhenar 6mo ago
JoachimS 6mo ago
Everything. They have done for decades, and will do for decades. And what IBM focus on is probably worth looking into. IBM (imho) is in the absolute frontline in quantum computers. One could argue if the number of startups in QC means that there is an actual market or not. Companies that lives on VC or the valuation of their stock. But IBM is not showy, not on the front pages, does not live on VC or stock valuation. IBM makes tons of money decade after decade from customers that are also not showy but makes tons of money. Banks, financial institutions, energy, logistics, health care etc etc. If IBM thinks these companies will benefit from using QC from IBM (and pay tons of money for it), there is quite probably some truth in QC becoming useful in the near future. Years rather than decades. IBM have run the numbers and have decided that spending the money for engineering, research required is outweighs the money possible to earn on QC services. QCs powerful enough to run the QC-supported algorithms these companies need to make more tons of money. And it's probably not breaking RSA or ECC.
- sophacles 6mo ago
  > And it's probably not breaking RSA or ECC. Evidence for this is in the number of articles that talk about simulated annealing/quantum annealing (or other optimization problems) w/r/t QC rather than crypto. Sure attention seeking headlines always focus on prime factoring, and the security aspect has a lot more enthusiast interest, but when you look past that into deeper stuff, a lot of the focus is on the optimization. And many industries can dramatically benefit from better optimization - think about how many companies are at their core bin-packers or traveling salesmen.... off the top of my head anything in logistics, airlines, many aspects of the energy sector, and on and on. The flash is in reading secrets, the money is in quantum annealing.
  - MILP 6mo ago
    Maybe they want to add quantum to CPLEX!
esseph 6mo ago
They own things like: 1. Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which is by far the most commonly deployed Linux variant among US Enterprise orgs. 2. Ansible 3. Podman 4. Hashicorp Terraform / Consul / Packer / Vagrant / Nomad / Etc. 5. Giant B2B services arm 6. Mainframe, which a lot of science organizations / governments / credit card companies still run. Sometimes you may have an IBM rep show up to replace a part on the mainframe you didn't even know was broken - very reliable, fault tolerant system. 7. The only service I know where you can rent Quantum computing time in the cloud 8. Probably a ton of other things I'm not even aware of. 9. Red Hat OpenShift - so if you're big enterprise running k8s on prem, there's a good chance it's OpenShift, especially in banking / finance / government.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
deepriverfish 6mo ago
my company uses as400 and DB2 and pay for their servers. So they still make money from hardware too
guenthert 6mo ago
You don't read much about IBM here, but this is the wrong site to look for them. A big chunk of IBM's business comes from other businesses outside the IT industry. You're more likely to read about IBM in the Wall Street Journal; Google finds "IBM" at wsj.com about 48000 times (it finds "oracle" there about 30000 times).
- seanmcdirmid 6mo ago
  IBM is known as a toxic tech along with Palantir and Oracle. We talk about IBM on HN, but mostly in negative contexts.
enether 6mo ago
They make $8-9B a year (~90% profit margins) selling software to mainframes, which were deployed ages ago but still have to be maintained because critical COBOL business code was written on their systems - and migration is too riskly/costly. To give you an idea: - of the risk in regulated industries like banking: a UK bank was once fined *$62 million* for botching a mainframe migration and causing downtime. - of the difficulty and risk in non-tech industries: Australia once spent *$120 million* trying to migrate its social security system off mainframes... and failed. Mainframes are not their only business, of course, but it's a major cash cow that's under appreciated. I, for one, didn't know that business keeps growing. Coincidentally, I wrote about the topic of mainframes with relation to IBM's acquisition of Confluent here today: https://blog.2minutestreaming.com/p/ibm-confluent-acquisition-mainframes-and-kafka https://blog.2minutestreaming.com/p/ibm-confluent-acquisitio...
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
kev009 6mo ago
With each passing CEO it seems to get more and more nebulous. But the mainframes are still technically interesting and they seem to be able to attract and retain quality CPU designers.
nineteen999 6mo ago
Im surprised how often this question is asked by people who really have no clue and refuse to do even the most basic research on a company.

This is a serious question. What does IBM, in fact, do? I'm surprised they are still around and apparently relevant. Are they more or less a services and consulting company now?

fock 6mo ago

They sell (managed) database appliances (on z and Power) and associated software (think the platform/HANA parts of SAP) - all state-of-the-art in the late 1990s but since then put on maintenance mode and it shows (a bit like oracle...). Their hardware is still cool custom built silicon and imo state of the art, but since k8s, high-speed-network and multi-TB-machines (for <100k$) are here and run Linux no new venture buys into that anymore (except for gulf states...). Before, when the competition was a cluster of Itanium/VMS or Sparc/Solaris and the associated contract, noone bought into that either at scale but also noone using IBM had a very compelling reason to switch everything around. So essentially they sell new hardware and "support" to customers who have been in need to process tabular, multi-GB databases since when a PC was 128MB memory and have been doing electronic record-keeping since the 1970s. They also allow their ~hostages~, ehm, customers who trust them with their data to run processing near the data at a cost/in a cloud style billing model. That is so expensive though that every large IBM-shop has built an elaborate layer of JVMs, Unix and mirror-databases around their IBM appliances. Lately they bought Redhat and hashicorp and confluent thus taking a cut from the "support" of the abominiations of IT systems they helped birth for some more time to come (also remember the alternative JVM OpenJ9, do you all?). I think the later a company started using centralized electronic record keeping, the higher the likelyhood they are not paying IBM anymore: commercial banks, governments and insurance started digitizing in the 60s (with custom software) and if the companies are old (or in US-friendly petrostates) they are all IBM customers. Corps using ERP or PLM offerings (so manufacturing and retail chains which are younger than banks) used to start digitizing a little later (Walmart only was founded in the 60s and electronic CAD started in the 80s) and while they likely used IBM in the past (SAP was big on DB2) they might not use it anymore (also it helps they usually bought the ERP or PLM from someone else). New Companies whose sole business was to run a digital-platform started on Unix (see Amazon who successfully fought to ditch Oracle even) or just built their whole platform (Google). If those companies predate Unix they usually fought hard to get rid of IBM (Microsoft, Amadeus) Consulting/outsourcing services have been spun out to Kyndryl, so nowadays IBM only sells hardware, support for their products and ostensibly has some people left to develop their products... The days when that was a big thing and IBM produced all the stuff they sell support for now, have been long gone. A fun link to see how their "product development" operates nowadays is this discussion to bring gitlab-runners to z/OS: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-runner/-/work_items/27526 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-runner/-/work_items/275... - tl;dr "hey you opensource company, we are IBM and managed to pay someone to port a go compiler to z/OS. Now we have a customer who wants to use gitlab with z/OS. Would you like to make your software part of our product offering?". A fun fact is that - even within IBM - access to the real mainframe seems to be very limited which shows a bit in the discussion linked above and also with an ex-Kyndryl-person saying: "oh, I once had a contract where we replaced the mainframe and we ran that on Linux-boxes inside IBM, because it was just cheaper that way. Just the big reporting was a bit slow, but the reliability was just fine"

dogma1138 6mo ago

Mainframes and consulting.

p-e-w 6mo ago

I was shocked when IBM acquired Red Hat a few years ago. I had silently assumed at the time that Red Hat was far bigger than IBM nowadays, so the reverse would have made more sense to me.

freedomben 6mo ago
Google was apparently in the running for acquiring Red Hat. I still wonder what Red Hat would be today if Google had acquired instead.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- mghackerlady 6mo ago
  much, much worse
  - freedomben 6mo ago
    Yes I agree, given the direction G has been going. I was disappointed at the time, but it was probably a blessing in disguise
    - mghackerlady 6mo ago
      honestly I think it's a net positive (for me at least) because it ensures Fedora has great POWER support (I'll never be able to afford a POWER machine at this rate, but the architecture is an absolute pleasure to work with whenever I have to)

Frieren 6mo ago

IBM has more revenue than Oracle even if we hear way less about it. 5 times smaller than Apple, thou. It also has more employees than Microsoft or Alphabet. But it has tighter profit margins than other tech companies. IBM is not in consumer products nor services so we do not hear about it.

lotsofpulp 6mo ago
Oracle/TSMC/SpaceX isn’t in consumer products/services, but they are heard about. IBM was declining for 10 years while the rest of the tech related businesses were blowing up, plus IBM does not pay well, so other than it being a business in decline, there wasn’t much to talk about. No one expects anything new from IBM. Also, they had quite a few big boondoggles where they were the bad guys helping swindle taxpayers due to the goodwill from their brand’s legacy, so being a dying rent seeking business as opposed to a growing innovative business was the assumption I had.
- hsbauauvhabzb 6mo ago
  They also helped the nazis
- freedomben 6mo ago
  SpaceX is pretty heavily in consumer products/services now that Starlink is big. But otherwise yes you are correct.
gpapilion 6mo ago
It’s a very different company post the PwC purchase. They have around 1/3 of the revenue from consulting which tends to push the valuation down due to its relative low margin when compared to software. This also inflates the number of employees.

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

ghaff 6mo ago

So they had $30 billion in software revenue last year and $15 billion in infrastructure against $20 billion in consulting.

lmpdev 6mo ago

I was surprised to find out they still have hardware repair technicians (extremely expensive but reliable: ~$400 per computer around 2022 iirc) But yes they’re mostly enterprise/services/mainframes not anything overly consumer

quietsegfault 6mo ago
No, IBM has Unisys contractors, not employees. All the techs I’ve worked with from IBM have been a nightmare. One dropped an entire drive array on the ground, and tried to install it despite it being bent and no longer fitting on the rack. I have been acquired by IBM twice. They are a nightmare, horrible company.
- stonogo 6mo ago
  IBM has plenty of hardware techs. They're called system services representatives (SSRs) and if you got a Unisys contractor, that just means you're not spending enough money for IBM to send an SSR.

bargainbin 6mo ago

I work for a big international corp. We pay IBM a blankest sum annually because it’s that hard to quantify just how much we rely on their services and licensing costs. Licensing of course just being typical rent seeking behaviour but their services are valuable given the financial impact if one of their solutions goes down on us (which is very rarely)

dgellow 6mo ago

When you’re that large and established it’s very hard to die. I expect IBM to exist in some form pretty much forever

shrimppersimmon 6mo ago

They design and build not one but two CPU architectures, s390/Z and POWER. Both have been around for many years, but neither is obsolete, they're just not designed for consumer applications. They still generate $10-15 billion per year in revenue.

eru 6mo ago
Power was used in customer applications a long time ago? I think Apple used them for a while and so did some game consoles?
- kstrauser 6mo ago
  Sort of, in the form of PowerPC, which was an Apple-IBM-Motorola (“AIM”) collaboration. It’s closely related to IBM’s Power line, but more like a predecessor than a sibling.
  - dcrazy 6mo ago
    Wasn’t PowerPC cut down from POWER?
- shrimppersimmon 6mo ago
  Yes. Apple used PowerPC, and PowerPC was also in the Xbox 360, PS3, Wii, and Wii U. It was also widespread in embedded sectors like networking, automotive, and aerospace. IBM eventually stepped away from the embedded market and eventually lost their foothold in consoles as well. While Raptor did offer Power9 systems at a somewhat accessible price point, the IBM-produced CPUs were still fundamentally enterprise-grade hardware, meaning they retained the high costs and "big iron" features of server tech.
  - mghackerlady 6mo ago
    What I wouldn't give for raptor money... they've gotten more and more expensive as time went on
6mo ago

jeswin 6mo ago

They design their own CPUs, and they sold $15b of hardware last year. Tellum ii in the z17 mainframe is a Samsung 5nm part. What I don't get however is who'd use their custom accelerators for AI inference.

eru 6mo ago
Anyone who can't get any better AI accelerators elsewhere? Last I heard, these things were sold out for years on end. And anyone who can make one, can sell them.

quietsegfault 6mo ago

They exist to swallow up profitable companies, extract any “unnecessary” overhead (like benefits, PTO, pay that isn’t rock bottom), and package into large enterprise licensing agreements.

eru 6mo ago
Sounds like a pretty good deal for those people who keep starting these 'profitable' companies. If IBM runs them into the ground, there's a niche for a copy-cat of the original company that you can just found again. Rinse and repeat.

Cthulhu_ 6mo ago

A better question would probably what they don't do; just going off the wiki page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM) for recent history, they're in health care (imaging), weather, video streaming, cloud services, Red Hat, managed infrastructure (which branched off into a company called Kyndryl, which has 90.000 employees in 115 countries), warfare ("In June 2025, IBM was named by a UN expert report as one of several companies "central to Israel's surveillance apparatus and the ongoing Gaza destruction.""), etc etc etc. Basically they do a lot, but they're not showy about it.

pezezin 6mo ago
> warfare ("In June 2025, IBM was named by a UN expert report as one of several companies "central to Israel's surveillance apparatus and the ongoing Gaza destruction."") It is not the first time IBM does that...

pjmlp 6mo ago

Own Red-Hat, thus major contributions to Wayland, GNOME, GCC and Java, at very least. Have their own Java implementation, with capabilities like AOT before OpenJDK got started on Leyden, or even Graal existed, for years had extensions for value types (nowadays dropped), and alongside Azul, cluster based JIT compiler that shares code across JVM instances. IBM i and z/OS are still heavely deployed in many organisations, alongside Aix, and LinuxONE (Linux running on mainframes and micros). Research in quantum computing, AI, design processes, one of the companies that does huge amounts of patents per year across various fields. And yes a services company, that is actually a consortium of IBM owned companies many of each under a different brand (which is followed by "an IBM company").

progmetaldev 6mo ago
I think a large number of people seem to forget the trust that companies have built on IBM over decades. The mainframe market is IBM, where IBM already had a hold. People want to believe that dropping such a large company could be done with a rewrite, but as long as IBM is there to support what they already have in place, it makes it unlikely for companies to move away. Obviously a team that has experience moving away from IBM technology to something more "modern" could go with another platform running on different hardware, but you don't hear about those migrations too much because they are rare (for a reason, IBM also offers support that companies love to cling on to). I don't blame companies that already tied up in IBM tech for sticking with what they already have. As boring and dated as IBM tech might be, it's still running a ton of infrastructure, and you don't get to be that kind of company without being solid and reliable. That's what companies want, even if a development team wants to flex their skills in something new and not tied to IBM.

roncesvalles 6mo ago

Putting consumer grade (aka "commodity") hardware in a datacenter and running your infra on it is a bit of a meme, in the sense that it's not the only way of doing things. It was probably pioneered/popularized by Google but that's because writing great software was their "hammer", ie they framed every computing problem as a software problem. It was probably easier for them (= Jeff Dean) to take mediocre hardware and write a robust distributed system on top instead of the other way around. There is, however, a completely different vision for how web infrastructure should be and that is to have extremely resilient hardware and simple software. That's what a mainframe is. You can write a simple and easy to maintain single process backend program, run it on a mainframe and be fairly confident that it can run without stopping for decades. Everything from the power supply to the CPU is redundant and can be hot swapped without booting the OS. Credit card transactions and banking software run on this model for example (just think about how insanely reliable credit card transactions are). IBM has a monopoly in the second world. You could say the entire field of distributed systems is one big indie effort to break free of IBM's monopoly on computing.

Nursie 6mo ago
> Credit card transactions and banking software run on this model for example Eh, they can but even a couple of decades ago there was a shift to open platforms. 90s and early 00s, sure, it was mainframe and exotic x86 species like Stratus machines. But even then the power of “throw a ton of cheaper Unix at it” was winning. Banks’ central systems maybe, I have less experience there. IBM did also try for a while to ride the Linux virtualisation wave as well, saying “hey, you can run thousands of Linux instances on a single mainframe”, and I did some work porting IBM software to s390 Linux around 2007.
- mghackerlady 6mo ago
  x86 servers weren't that common in the 90s and early 200s, that was all sun or the other commercial unix peoples things
  - greedo 6mo ago

itake 6mo ago

I own their shares due to their Quantum Computing group You can see their roadmap here: https://www.ibm.com/roadmaps/ https://www.ibm.com/roadmaps/

phrotoma 6mo ago

Early in my career I spent some years working at the biggest bank in Canada, they were (and still are) an enormous IBM customer. Hardware, software, consulting, and probably lots of other things I had no visibility into. Beneath the countless layers of VMs and copious weird purpose built gear like Tandem and Base24 for the ATMs was a whole bunch of true blue z/OS powered IBM mainframes chugging through thousands and thousands of interlocking COBOL programs that do everything from moving files between partner banks all over the world, moving money between accounts, compounding interest, and extracting a metric shitton of every type of fee imaginable. If you know z/OS there's work available until your retirement. Miserable, pointless, banal, and archaic legacy as fuck mainframe work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tandem_Computers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tandem_Computers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASE24 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASE24 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z/OS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z/OS

parthdesai 6mo ago
I don't how exaggerated this story is, but one of my buddies did his internship at TD. One of his skip managers told him if you know COBOL there are departments that will give you a blank cheque during salary ngotiation.
- phrotoma 6mo ago
  Yeah it's hard to say but I believe there's at least some truth to that. I took COBOL off my resume over a decade ago just to combat the volume of recruiters trying to drag me away from the cloud back to on-prem land. A good friend of mine who worked on a CICS based credit card processing application at that bank doubled his salary twice inside of 4 yrs. First by quitting the bank and going to a boutique consultancy to build competing software (which they sold to other banks) and then by quitting that job and coming back to the bank to takeover the abysmal state the CICS app had lapsed into in his absence. And that was circa 2010. One thing that was true of the bank then and I'm sure is true now is that when they see a nail they truly have just the one hammer. When a problem comes along, hit it with a huge sack of cash until it goes away.
- vbezhenar 6mo ago

JoachimS 6mo ago

Everything. They have done for decades, and will do for decades. And what IBM focus on is probably worth looking into. IBM (imho) is in the absolute frontline in quantum computers. One could argue if the number of startups in QC means that there is an actual market or not. Companies that lives on VC or the valuation of their stock. But IBM is not showy, not on the front pages, does not live on VC or stock valuation. IBM makes tons of money decade after decade from customers that are also not showy but makes tons of money. Banks, financial institutions, energy, logistics, health care etc etc. If IBM thinks these companies will benefit from using QC from IBM (and pay tons of money for it), there is quite probably some truth in QC becoming useful in the near future. Years rather than decades. IBM have run the numbers and have decided that spending the money for engineering, research required is outweighs the money possible to earn on QC services. QCs powerful enough to run the QC-supported algorithms these companies need to make more tons of money. And it's probably not breaking RSA or ECC.

sophacles 6mo ago
> And it's probably not breaking RSA or ECC. Evidence for this is in the number of articles that talk about simulated annealing/quantum annealing (or other optimization problems) w/r/t QC rather than crypto. Sure attention seeking headlines always focus on prime factoring, and the security aspect has a lot more enthusiast interest, but when you look past that into deeper stuff, a lot of the focus is on the optimization. And many industries can dramatically benefit from better optimization - think about how many companies are at their core bin-packers or traveling salesmen.... off the top of my head anything in logistics, airlines, many aspects of the energy sector, and on and on. The flash is in reading secrets, the money is in quantum annealing.
- MILP 6mo ago
  Maybe they want to add quantum to CPLEX!

esseph 6mo ago

They own things like: 1. Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which is by far the most commonly deployed Linux variant among US Enterprise orgs. 2. Ansible 3. Podman 4. Hashicorp Terraform / Consul / Packer / Vagrant / Nomad / Etc. 5. Giant B2B services arm 6. Mainframe, which a lot of science organizations / governments / credit card companies still run. Sometimes you may have an IBM rep show up to replace a part on the mainframe you didn't even know was broken - very reliable, fault tolerant system. 7. The only service I know where you can rent Quantum computing time in the cloud 8. Probably a ton of other things I'm not even aware of. 9. Red Hat OpenShift - so if you're big enterprise running k8s on prem, there's a good chance it's OpenShift, especially in banking / finance / government.

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deepriverfish 6mo ago

my company uses as400 and DB2 and pay for their servers. So they still make money from hardware too

guenthert 6mo ago

You don't read much about IBM here, but this is the wrong site to look for them. A big chunk of IBM's business comes from other businesses outside the IT industry. You're more likely to read about IBM in the Wall Street Journal; Google finds "IBM" at wsj.com about 48000 times (it finds "oracle" there about 30000 times).

seanmcdirmid 6mo ago
IBM is known as a toxic tech along with Palantir and Oracle. We talk about IBM on HN, but mostly in negative contexts.

enether 6mo ago

They make $8-9B a year (~90% profit margins) selling software to mainframes, which were deployed ages ago but still have to be maintained because critical COBOL business code was written on their systems - and migration is too riskly/costly. To give you an idea: - of the risk in regulated industries like banking: a UK bank was once fined *$62 million* for botching a mainframe migration and causing downtime. - of the difficulty and risk in non-tech industries: Australia once spent *$120 million* trying to migrate its social security system off mainframes... and failed. Mainframes are not their only business, of course, but it's a major cash cow that's under appreciated. I, for one, didn't know that business keeps growing. Coincidentally, I wrote about the topic of mainframes with relation to IBM's acquisition of Confluent here today: https://blog.2minutestreaming.com/p/ibm-confluent-acquisition-mainframes-and-kafka https://blog.2minutestreaming.com/p/ibm-confluent-acquisitio...

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kev009 6mo ago

With each passing CEO it seems to get more and more nebulous. But the mainframes are still technically interesting and they seem to be able to attract and retain quality CPU designers.

nineteen999 6mo ago

Im surprised how often this question is asked by people who really have no clue and refuse to do even the most basic research on a company.