Making sense of IBM SW financials

From the earnings release:
Software — revenues of $7.8 billion, up 5 percent:

Hybrid Cloud (Red Hat) up 11 percent
Automation up 4 percent, up 3 percent at constant currency
Data up 19 percent, up 18 percent at constant currency
Transaction Processing down 8 percent, down 9 percent at constant currency

$M
Hybrid Cloud 1,998
Automation 1,951
Data 1,782
Transaction Processing 2,030

Obviously Hybrid Cloud = Red Hat and Transaction Processing = all the old legacy mainframe SW like IMS, CICS, TPF, etc. But where do some of the other recent large SW acquisitions go? I assume Turbonomic and Apptio go under Automation? Datastax and Confluent go under Data? Where does Hashicorp go?

My sense is that pretty much ALL of the reported SW growth is coming from those 6 relatively recent acquisitions, not anything actually developed at IBM. But I'm curious which of those acquisitions are contributing most.

#Acquisition #Analysis #Business #Data #Software

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It's all noise anyway. Remember how Arvind pretended we were an AI contender and made everyone do those stupid Watsonx challenges? Then overnight all that is played down and practically forgotten as IBM emerges into a quantum computing company, something it never made any money on and perhaps employs at most 200 people in the entire company? Same thing happened with Blockchain. Same thing happened with hybrid cloud. And so on. Funny numbers and a strategy that changes like the wind blows. Which is to say the "strategy" itself blows.

The reality is IBM is no longer a real tech company at all. It is a Private Equity company that leverages its mass scale to conduct mergers and acquisitions to avoid accountability for another day. Lures investors in with big dividends, their share of the spoils. If you've been acquired by IBM, expect to be Red Lobstered or Toys R Us-ed, thriving companies that were acquired by PE and run into the ground as the execs looted anything not bolted down. (Those same companies overseas are doing quite well because PE is not allowed to do what they are allowed to do in the US. For example, you can still buy things at Toys "R" Us in Japan and what a delight that place is).

@OP
There are at least 2 versions of IBM financials.
The one published, that reflects the dreams of executives and the wishes of investors.
The one circulating internally, used to justify layoffs and migration of workforce from US to India.
None of these two versions is close to reality.

Bob loves magic beans. Wanna buy some?

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Making sense of IBM SW financials

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