IBM beat market expectations with a $24.36bn second quarter revenue yesterday, despite the sum representing a 2% drop on the year before.
However, this drop was alleviated by a jump in profit, up 28% on last year to hit $4.1bn, after the firm took a charge on rebalancing its workforce in 2013.
We won’t bore you with all the details, but here’s a few key findings worth highlighting as a guide to what is and isn’t earning IBM its money these days.
Security revenues up more than 20% on last year
IBM did well enough in security to secure the top spot in Gartner’s recent Magic Quadrant, with its Security QRadar solution, which offered customers an "integrated view of the threat environment using NetFlow DPI and full packet capture in combination with log data, configuration data and vulnerability data from monitored sources," according to the analyst firm.
Mobile revenue grew more than 100% year-on-year, cloud revenue by 50%
Last year IBM acquired SoftLayer, the cloud services provider, and has spent $1.5bn this year getting the SoftLayer cloud running on 40 data centres worldwide.
"We performed well in our strategic imperatives around cloud, big data and analytics, security and mobile," said CEO Virginia Rometty.
There was no numbers breakdown for these revenues, but it doesn’t sound bad – especially considering IBM’s recently announced tie in with Apple to join forces to take on the enterprise market.
But hardware revenue fell 11% to $3.3bn and services dropped 1% to $13.9bn
Not to mention software revenue increased by 1% to $6.5bn, all accounting for a pretty poor showing for IBM’s legacy businesses. This means its success in cloud, mobile and analytics is just a drop in the ocean.
