Consulting.

Company X has Problem Y that can be solved with technology. Company X feels they don't have the know how to do it so they pay IBM to help them do it.

IBM has a suite of products/services that have been put together to speed this process up, but they will also put together custom products/services (for a handsome fee).

They provide services. You are a big company and need a software system that can manage your oil refinery or factory - they make it. They do hardware, but much less than before. Their DB2 database is a big competitor to Oracle db. They do cloudlike services, but not as a public service available to anyone.

Their competitors are Oracle, SAP and big consultancy firms. Think big budgets.

Bluemix is their public cloud. Doesn't suck.

Very good tip! I'm going to try it!

Yep. Actually quite useful.

Mainframes. If you're a bank or an enterprise of a certain size, then a chunk of your annual IT budget goes right to IBM for mainframe maintenance and licensing every year.

In 2012, The Economist reported that mainframes accounted for about a quarter of IBM's revenue and about half of its profits. [0] [1]

IT budgets for large banks and financial firms usually dedicate something like 20% their budget to mainframes, but it usually accounts for about 80% of the firm's workload/processing.

[0]: http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2012/09/ibms-mainf... [1]: http://blog.nullspace.io/mainframes.html

Absolutely. I was at a local university, in April, where IBM had donated a mainframe. While the university wasn't sure what to do with it, it was spectacularly iconic, sitting in its own glass walled 200m2 room.

After a while, it had the effect of making students getting interested in banking and transaction orientated software engineering, completing the cycle, joining internship programs and maintaining the mainframe paradigm for the next couple of generations.

Wouldn't you? A massive mainframe you can play on as a student, no need for a VM, just log right in!

Not any more: "Toshiba gobbles IBM's POS biz for $850m" - 17 Apr 2012

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/04/17/toshiba_buys_ibm_ret...

Starbucks seems to be in the process of upgrading to newer models, and they say Toshiba on them instead of IBM.

Nope, they sold the retail stuff to Toshiba years ago.

It's helpful when looking at a modern IBM to consider them as a finance company as opposed to a tech company.

WAS, RAD, DB2, MQ Series

Cognos