Back in the summer of 2013 I wrote a series of articles on what I called the “Datacenter Zombie Apocalypse.”

The first was an observation of the troubles IBM was undergoing trying to shift its very datacenter-oriented services and outsourcing business to one that was more cloud focused and how it might serve as a bellwether for the IT industry as a whole.

The other was about how, as an IT practicioner, one might transition their skills to be more cloud-oriented.

Where are we now with all of this, over a year later?

IBM’s situation has gotten worse. While it continues to invest in Cloud, its services revenue is flat, and has been forced to divest two separate hardware businesses — its x86 server business to Lenovo and its silicon manufacturing capacity that powers their System p and System z enterprise systems to GlobalFoundries.

The company will almost certainly rebound, but at a cost. It intends to take a $4.7B charge against revenue in the 3rd quarter and almost certainly more layoffs are in store for the Armonk technology giant, which has over 400,000 employees globally.

SOURCE: zdnet.com