IBM Strategic Imperatives mark a transition into software and services

IBM’s transition from a dominant server hardware supplier to one focused on new-age software and services has been what you might expect from a 100-year old company: glacially slow and sometimes painful.

But lately the 100-year-old seems to have a bit more spring in its step.

Several years ago, IBM launched its Strategic Imperatives initiative, a mission to drive revenues in emerging markets, including cloud, analytics, mobile, social and security services, to hedge against rapidly falling sales of its legacy server hardware.

Over much of that time, IBM Strategic Imperatives revenues have grown double digits and now represent over 43% of IBM’s overall sales over the past 12 months. The company’s cloud revenues reached $15.1 billion over the past 12 months and as-a-service revenues from the Strategic Imperatives rose to $8.8 billion.

IBM’s transition to a more meaningful cloud strategy has been circuitous. The company had a somewhat aimless focus on cloud strategy until it purchased the Dallas-based SoftLayer Technologies, Inc. in 2013 for $2.5 billion. SoftLayer, then the largest privately held infrastructure provider, would hook its public cloud services with IBM’s SmartCloud offerings so users could more quickly and easily incorporate cloud computing.