IBM Explores Sale of Weather Business (wsj.com) 32
International Business Machines is exploring a sale of its weather operation, WSJ reported, citing people familiar with the matter, as the technology company seeks to streamline its operations. From a report: An auction of the business is at an early stage, the people said, and there may not be a deal. Should there be one, private-equity is most likely the buyer in a deal that could be valued at more than $1 billion, the people said. IBM agreed to buy the business in 2015, purchasing The Weather Company's business-to-business, mobile and cloud-based businesses including Weather.com, which provides weather forecasts around the globe. The deal price at the time was pegged at more than $2 billion.
The Weather Channel wasn't part of the deal, but agreed to license weather-forecast data and analytics from IBM. The deal was part of a push by IBM to use its cloud infrastructure to provide accurate weather forecasts and help companies control costs. The business issues more than 25 billion forecasts a day, according to the company's website. A sale of the weather unit would be a part of a broader push by IBM to streamline its operations as the once-dominant company's shares languish near levels they traded at more than 20 years ago.
The Weather Channel wasn't part of the deal, but agreed to license weather-forecast data and analytics from IBM. The deal was part of a push by IBM to use its cloud infrastructure to provide accurate weather forecasts and help companies control costs. The business issues more than 25 billion forecasts a day, according to the company's website. A sale of the weather unit would be a part of a broader push by IBM to streamline its operations as the once-dominant company's shares languish near levels they traded at more than 20 years ago.
Nice (Score:2)
Now all these years later they're going to sell it for half the price they paid for it.
Ginni Rometty was bad at her job.
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The IBM weather service gets used extensively across GIS, particularly in agriculture.
I guess, a big old dinosaur like IBM just doesnt know how to get the sums to add up for it however.
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Now all these years later
after running it into the ground, or more accurately a cliff,
they're going to sell it for half the price they paid for it.
assuming they can find any buyers for the mess they've made. They may end up having to pay someone to take it off their hands given the massive amount of expensive remediation it'll need to do to fix up eight years of IBM fscking it up.
What is left to streamline? (Score:4, Interesting)
Hard disk business, sold.
Laptop business, sold.
Desktop PC business, er withered and sold or was it just selling a dead corpse.
Printers, sold off hardware then licensed the name? Is there even an IBM printer anymore?
OS Warp was a thing, and Lotus something or other.
They now just do software?
Somehow owns RedHat
They still have mainframes and quantum computing I guess - this is all from a consumer standpoint not an industry or business to business standpoint so I am missing important things maybe.
Moved to India. Bye Bye.
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Re:What is left to streamline? (Score:5, Interesting)
They did not sell half of the company because they could not compete. All of whaat they sold was and still is profitable. Some of it, like the ThinkPad laptop line, was also an extremely important prestige product, being the one and only Best Laptop In The World that ever was and has been, a title still unclaimed more than ten years later.
No, they sold everything to make the stock price rise so that CEO whatshisface could claim his contractual bonuses, that were tied to the stock price. The problem was, none of the markets IBM was in were growth markets, with the exception of cloud. IBM really is not about growth markets, their insane corporate bureaucratic inertia makes growth markets unworkable for them. Just look at all the market share their cloud effort has brought them over the years... less than two percent. No, IBM is about specific mature b2b markets, in which they reign supreme.
So what can you do to raise the stock price if you have no growth in sight? Well it's your lucky day, because there is nothing quite like "sell-offs^WW focusing on core competencies" to give the stock market a hard-on.
What is also not their core competency is their cloud offerings, the stupid kerfuffle with Red Hat and so on, but no one on the stock market seems to mind that. So do not get your panties in a bunch on the hype train. At least they are trying, I guess. But what is their core competency is exactly what you said you missed - b2b, and in particular, legacy tech. Especially supercomputers, which are not going anywhere, and bring in the big money. But also, boring software for boring businesses doing boring things nobody else wants anything to do with.
Re: What is left to streamline? (Score:3)
Just a correction, IBM is not so much in the supercomputer business anymore. They sold their x86 server business to Lenovo and with it, the x86 supercomputer team. They did try to make a go of continuing POWER supercomputers, but they've pretty much exited that as well now.
Their bread and butter hardware wise is mainframe. Companies endlessly refreshing without disturbing their existing stuff, no matter how exorbitant the price. They hold on a bit on POWER, but it's essentially a token effort mainly bec
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Aren't the mainframes and minis all running on POWER now, anyway?
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There was an initiative by IBM to migrate their 'p', 'i', and 'z' to all be POWER based. Nearly 20 years ago.
They did in fact migrate 'i' to just be an OS to run on the same systems and processors as 'p'. Basically a cost optimization of development expense, develop only one thing and they all have to share.
However, I think they abandoned the 'z' part of that initiative. I suspect they realized that the last thing IBM can afford to do is screw around on mainframes in any way that could even *hint* at inco
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Does this mean that System/360 is now POWER but System/390 is not?
System/360 is the upward-compatible line from the 1960s.
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As far as I know, neither of those are POWER.
AS/400 was the 'mini' line, converged CPU wise with RS/6000.
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Modern RS/6000 is POWER. It's what POWER architecture is based on.
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Yes. AS/400 was what would become 'i' (mini) and that got moved to POWER as of POWER4 (POWER4 was the very end of the RS/6000 branding, so effectively the beginning of 'p' marked the processor architecture converging for 'mini' and AIX systems). Mini had evolved to be nothing more than a software load ontop of 'system p' servers by 2005 or so.
S/360, etc. through current mainframe has not been POWER, but its own thing. There *was* an IBM initiative to try to converge everything on POWER in mid 2000s, but i
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and what is left, exactly?
PAAS - Pajeets As A Service
Re:What is left to streamline? (Score:5, Interesting)
You know nothing John Snow.
Look up Connect:Direct in it's 100 forms. Every bank on the planet uses it, nearly every federal reserve bank on the planet uses it guess who owns it? Right IBM. It also powers the stock market back-end ... funny that.
They also have a large slew of B2B shelf software that nearly every mid to large company uses for accounting/payroll/hr/pr/etc.
That's why they are a DOW 30 company.
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What does Microsoft "do"? Mostly the same as IBM.
IBM sells enterprise software to businesses. That is what it does.
Making money selling bits and bobs is a fool's game. Software - where you make something once and sell it 10,000 times - is the high-margin business. Always was, always will be.
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Desktop PC business, er withered and sold or was it just selling a dead corpse.
At one time they had two competing and completely separate desktop PC divisions, and they were completely separate from the laptop business.
IBM used to be so large nobody knew what was going on. I guess it's still kinda like that today.
sale of weather (Score:4, Funny)
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Yes, but there's a 20-30% chance in your area that some of that purchase will be routed back to NOAA for the forecast. /smile
Won't that be a relief? (Score:3)
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Ask across the pillow for the weather or ask the personal assistant on your phone?
The phone assistant won't end up sleeping on the couch if they get it badly wrong.
Value extracted (Score:2)
Weather Underground used to have insanely accurate mid- and short-term forecasts for my area, powered by personal weather stations. Their algorithms compensated for the relatively inaccurate PWS data (rarely calibrated or installed in standardized ways) by leveraging the sheer number of personal weather stations compared to National Weather Service observation stations.
Then IBM bought them, acted as if the PWS owners were a drag on the bottom line instead of the key to Weather Underground's success, drove m
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Agree. Also, they did their best to make the WU app suck as much as possible.
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Came here to post this. Weather Underground was the premier weather service, almost a social network back in the day, and was awesome. The "web 2.0" redesign was never much liked. The IBM acquisition of the product finally killed off the "classic" version and I can't recall the last time I heard anyone mention the site by name. I did use WU recently to look up PWS in an area we're looking to buy a house in, to get a feel for the general wind direction and microclimate, since it's in an odd valley that weath
IBM felt the need to explain buying weather.com (Score:2)
IBM used to have an entire microsite on weather.com explaining why they bought it. I can't remember their specific reasons and can't find the microsite anymore.