IBM's cash-balance move could start trend
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Starting next year, International Business Machines (IBM) will exclude new workers from its contested cash-balance pension plan and offer them only a 401(k) savings plan.
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IBM&#39;s possible exit from the personal-computer business would be the latest move in what amounts to a long goodbye from a field it pioneered and revolutionized.
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It seems like the season of big contracts. Dell recently bagged a biggie from Philips and now IBM gains one from the Britainâs retail bank, Lloyds TSB.
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The Palmisano era is gaining speed with renewed emphasis on growth, and the culture at IBM is changing, Brian Bergstein reports from New York.
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BusinessWeek Online - On the surface, IBM seems to be cruising. Its stock is trading near a six-year high, at almost $106, and its overall financial performance has been improving steadily for more than a year. On May 29, the company raised this year&#39;s per-share earnings forecast after stepping up a stock repurchase plan.
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There are smart moves, and there are stupid moves. For some reason, IBM is selling ThinkPad, the best business notebook brand name, to some Far East discount outfit. That can't be a smart move. As a nonsmart counter-move, I figured I'd better break down and buy one of the darn things before none were left. So I did.
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IBM (IBM.N: Quote, Profile, Research) is looking to sell its personal computer business in a deal that could be worth up to $2 billion, The New York Times reported
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IBM IBM.N is looking to sell its personal computer business in a deal that could be worth up to $2 billion, The New York Times reported on Friday, capping a gradual withdrawal from the business it pioneered.
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IBM plans to announce today that it is getting into a fast-growing segment of the data storage industry that&#39;s currently dominated by Hewlett-Packard.
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San Francisco, December 4: IBM is reportedly in talks to sell its personal computer business in a deal that could be worth up to $2 billion and would cap a gradual withdrawal from the business it helped to pioneer in 1981.
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There are smart moves, and there are stupid moves. For some reason, IBM is selling ThinkPad, the best business notebook brand name, to some Far East discount outfit. That can't be a smart move. As a nonsmart counter-move, I figured I'd better break down and buy one of the darn things before none were left. So I did.ADVERTISEMENTWhite paper: Solutions to Address IT Control RequirementsLearn how BMC Software Solutions address requirements such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Section 404 in this 20 page whitepaper!
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The money is coming. Profit from where it will go.
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The "smart money" is seeing value in the software sector.
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After some key changes, the company may be poised for growth.
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After years of hearing that investing in IT was a smart strategic plan, business executives seem to have gotten the message, according to a new Gartner CIO survey released today -- but only when the dollars are going to technology efforts that have visible benefits for the bottom line, primarily externally facing initiatives involving customers or partners.The good news is that, despite the softening economy, IT budgets are going up 3.3 percent across the nearly 1,500 companies that Gartner surveyed. The data that matters for IT execs: Budgets for companies focused on bottom-line-oriented efforts are increasing 4.9 percent, said Mark McDonald, a Gartner Group vice president. Those organizations whose IT strategy involves only an efficiency focus will typically see budget increases of just 1.7 percent.The survey shows that a sea change has occurred in IT priorities, McDonald noted. The top three priorities in 2008 are improving business processes, attracting and retaining new customers, and creating new products and services. The sea change is the third priority, which was the No. 10 priority in 2007. Gone from the top three is reducing enterprise costs, which has slipped to No. 5. The decline of cost-cutting as a priority and the rise of innovation show the sea change that has occurred, McDonald says.But IT managers hoping for a return to the 1990s glory days of annual budget increases of 15-plus percent will be disappointed, McDonald said. In that era, IT budgets were driven by technology initiatives done almost for their own sake, as businesses both experimented with the new Internet and began to use technology widely within their walls. "Today, it's more about specific business needs," he said, "We're seeing strategies well grounded in business operations changes, not chasing a fad."And it's not CIOs driving the budget growth; it's the C-suite executives who now finally see IT as a business enabler, McDonald added. If anything, CIOs who promote IT as a force for business change were typically dismissed as self-interested. He noted, "Calling attention to yourself is never very positive."Although there is a mounting possibility that the U.S. economy may be entering a recession, McDonald doesn't believe IT will see its budgets slashed, as happened in the 2000-2001 recession. That recession came after years of unbridled IT spending whose specific business benefits were often unclear. The more moderate budget growth predicted for 2008 won't give businesses the same easy cuts they had then, he noted. "If you cut IT's budget by 10 percent, you might just see a 0.2 percent effect on the whole budget," McDonald explained, "You can get more bang for your buck by lowering [overall] operations costs through investing in better IT." That's why businesses are looking to increase IT spending for bottom-line-oriented initiatives, he said.
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The argument has long been that even if IBM loses money selling PCs - and in recent years it frequently has - those sales are still a foot in the door, a route to selling higher margin servers, software and services.
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Management changes might make this a good value play.