I used to work at IBM (as a senior-level manager) and I can say truthfully that the only way IBM is going to make it is if it completely lets go almost all of its business units and rebuilds from the ground up. Every single LOB they have is archaic. I remember when I was first hired at IBM. They showed every new employee a propaganda video which was like a 10 minute montage of IBM's innovation since it started. That video ended with the final innovation -- landing on the moon. That's right. The last real innovation IBM truly contributed to was LANDING ON THE MOON. Fifty years ago.
In the last 20 years, all IBM has done is try to innovate through acquisitions. Buy a company. Put together a five year business plan to milk the acquiree's customers. "Blue wash" their products. Push new IBM bloatware to those customers. Get rid of 95% of the acquiree's employees through attrition... and replace them with IBM employees from other liquidated business units. Wash, rinse, repeat.
They have a requirement for all business units to ensure that a certain percentage of the workforce was offshore. Also, since their HR review process uses comparison against your peers... people get fired or put on performance plans every quarter. I remember going into ridiculous meetings where my boss would tell me that I didn't have enough of my peopl eranked as low performers... I needed to come up with some names. Didn't matter if my entire team met their personal goals. I had to rate a certain percentage a "3" or my boss would do it for me. Wonderful. IBM used to have a policy of matching 401k contributions with each paycheck. Well, they changed that to a one-time match in December. The kicker there was that if you got laid off/fired before December... then you lost all of your match. Nice, eh? It just so happened that the big layoffs came before the 401k match date. Lots of wonderful cost savings for IBM.
Meanwhile... during periods where several consecutive quarters of revenue misses happened... and tens of thousands of people were fired... Ginni Rometty and her peers received millions of dollars in bonuses. Nice, eh?
I could go on and on. But IBM is simply a crap company. My advice to anybody would be to stay away from there. If your company gets acquired by IBM... stick around for three years. Collect your paycheck, come in late every day, go as slow as possible in your daily work, don't fret while IBM ruins your product by demanding you include 20 year-old technology into your shiny product. Then leave after you are fully vested. Leave immediately and don't look back.
If you are a new college graduate and you get hired by IBM, stick around for no more than two years. You will get a much better job elsewhere. But do not stay.
IBM is a dying company. It has been shitting the bed pan for the last five years and it is only going to get worse. Steer clear.