This article confirms what a lot of posters have been saying. IBM Consulting needs a desperate restructuring
https://stocktwits.com/news-articles/markets/equity/ibm-openai-partnership-thousands-experts-engineers-ceo-arvind-krishna-letter/cZoq7fLRJho
13 replies (most recent on top)
Did PJ C. address either of these on his Reddit AMA: IBM Bob’s spectacular failure or IBM’s record-setting one-day market-cap collapse on July 14, 2026—a selloff substantially tied to concerns about weakness in his IBM Z/mainframe systems?
Or were those topics quietly and conveniently left in the “let’s not talk about that” section of the AMA? 😏
Forbes is paid by IBM to lie http://techrights.org/n/2025/10/13/Forbes_Already_Stopped_Being_a_News_Sites_Now_It_s_a_Spam_and_P.shtml
@19y. Forbes isn’t wrong when it comes to “actual” consulting, but the problem is IBM consulting contains way way way too much commodity body shop employees who don’t consult, but rather do perform which should be outsourced. IBM’s consulting management doesn’t want to acknowledge this as the focus within IBM consulting is revenue preservation (even if it loses money) vs profit. It’s way past time for IBM consulting to be reorg’ed around a profit objective.
But Forbes says we are the best!
https://lnkd.in/p/g7Qa28St
So WTF is going on?
“What about Bob?“
What about it. It is grossly non-competitive to agentic tools like Claude, ChatGPT, and others.
Whatever fool decided to fork it and paint Roo and the VS Code blue ought to be fired and their collective salaries and investment returned to the shareholders.
No one wants this cr-p and those who know, know. ICA, while we‘re at it, too.
@Ec. You have hit the nail on the head. IBM has invested in buying niche consulting practices for the past 5 years, and absolutely touts how signings every quarter are up up up, YET consulting revenue remains flat. Somebody is lying, and I suspect if consulting was downsized by 50%, revenue would certainly go down, but profit would remain relatively stable. There is a tremendous amount of empty calories being consumed in consulting. Time for a big refocus / reorg on what consulting wants to be when it grows up.
IBM’s remaining niche play is smaller, “good enough” models that cost less to run in production.
That really hasn't been a play since the days of Llama 3 (mid 2024). Today's small open models like Gemma blow Granite out of the water. The Chinese models dominate from mid size models up to just short of today's largest frontier models. You can't build a business around a niche when better products then yours are widely available for FREE in that niche and beyond. And yes, everyone from banks to the federal government are using these free models, no one cares about IBM's tired arguments about safety/governance.
The leaders of this IBM "FDU" will now spend 100% of their time convincing everyone else at IBM-C to tag all of their deals (that have absolutely nothing to do with OpenAI) as OpenAI FDU in ISC to inflate the numbers on paper. Every quarter IBM will report that their OpenAI business grew by $X Billion, but oddly overall IBM Consulting revenue will remain flat or drop. Same story since the days of CAMSS and Strategic Imperatives.
Re : “Consulting's parent company dropped the ball and doesn't have its own products to sell.“
Consulting’s parent company actively pulled the plug on its own model development activities a good while ago and now chooses to rebundle or sell services around other companies’ agentic AI and truly large LLMs. IBM’s remaining niche play is smaller, “good enough” models that cost less to run in production. You can’t come out on top in every revolution, and this is IBM’s way of making lemonade.
Many of IBM’s better known people in these areas are no longer at IBM. Some were practically driven out by d-mb business folks who listen only to their cell phones and spreadsheets, often after first being placed on id--tic death marches to do the simultaneously impossible and undesirable.
@a3 What about Bob, indeed! This feels very much like yet another highly orchestrated, buzz-driven campaign emerging from a different org area then a lot of the recent news designed to generate enthusiasm and support the stock narrative than to deliver substantive, measurable outcomes.
@a3 They don’t want you point this out or asking these types of questions!
@OP What IBM Consulting needs is something to sell.
They're selling OpenAI services because Consulting's parent company dropped the ball and doesn't have its own products to sell. This situation does not seem that it will change until AK's exit, and probably not even then.
What about Bob?