I believe they are referring to a shift to cloud-based servers that usually aren't stock IBM/HP/Dell, etc... machines, but rather custom builds for the cloud.

I wouldn't go so far as to say doomed, but it will be a shrinking business until is his a steady level.

Lenovo has done a pretty good job with the PC/workstation side of IBM that it bought a few years ago. There's no reason to think that they wouldn't do just as well with the servers. Just because IBM doesn't want to spend time for the small (to them) profit in servers doesn't mean that there isn't some real money to be made in that market.

We use computers to help us solve so many more problems today then we ever have before and we have much higher expectations of IT-system today. So, the metal scraps used for this keeps piling up in data centres all over the world.

Anecdotal observation: Many of my clients avoids using cloud services often cited reasons: cost and worries over ownership of data.

Based on the my observations my prediction is that traditional server vendors will keep on growing their business for many years to come but it's very likely that cloud services such as PaS/IaS will grow at faster pace ...

Do your clients have highly variable workloads? I'm curious how cloud hosting can be price competitive with dedicated or colocated servers.

Huge cloud providers like Amazon do utilize custom built servers, but most enterprise "private clouds" will still be buying Dell or HP servers.