IBM digs deeper on expense accounts in pursuit of the five year plan
IBM’s board of directors got nervous recently when they were told that the company had uncovered higher levels of employee expense fraud.
Mark Loughridge, chief financial officer, says he had a response: “There’s nothing going on here: we’re just catching everyone.” Read more
When it comes to mobile, IBM gets religion
IBM has a tried and trusted method for turbo-charging its growth in promising new IT markets: rebrand its existing efforts in the field in question, boast about all the investments it’s already made – and then promise to double them.
Analytics, security and ecommerce have all come in for this kind of treatment, making them bright spots in an otherwise low-growth company. Now it’s the turn of mobile computing. Read more
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IBM claim that they have finally broken one of the most frustrating trends in computing history – that the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years, known as Moore’s Law – by creating a memory bit about 100 times more dense than current memory systems. Read more
When Taiwan’s Quanta landed orders from Facebook and Google to help custom-build their data centres earlier this year, it was the first step into a new industry for the world’s biggest contract maker of notebooks.
Quanta chairman Barry Lam’s said on Monday, however, that his ambitions go further than just completing built-to-order projects for tech companies. Quanta will instead look to offer a full turnkey solution for servers, he said for the first time. It is a move that will put it into direct competition with industry leaders like HP, Dell, IBM and Sun Microsystems. Read more
With all the tablets and smart phones that fight for our attention, more traditional tech companies have been pushed to the background. Yet IBM and HP each managed to grab the attention of the tech world this week when IBM appointed Ginni Rometty as chief executive and HP announced it would keep its PC division. Read more
Chipmakers get serious on bigger discs
Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York, announced on Tuesday $4.4bn of investments involving chipmakers that would make his state “the epicentre for the next generation of computer chip technology”. Silicon Valley may be surprised to hear it has been dethroned and, cutting through the political point-scoring, the real significance here for semiconductors seems to be a readiness of the main players to cooperate on moving to the next-generation of silicon wafers. Read more
30 years on, IBM lays its PC ghosts to rest
It was back in 1980 that IBM committed the tech industry’s most famous mistake: hiring a little company called Microsoft to write an operating system for its first PC. Now, with Big Blue’s stock market value once again surpassing that of Microsoft in intraday trading on Monday, it can finally turn the page on a less-than-glorious chapter in its 100-year history. Read more
The computing industry has benefited this year from an unexpected rebound in business spending on information technology in the developed world and continued rapid growth in the emerging markets, according to figures released by some of the industry’s leading names late on Tuesday.
Tech news from around the web:
IBM said on Wednesday that it will spend $20bn on acquisitions over the next five years as it reaches for $20 EPS by 2015. Big Blue may need some new products, as the FT’s Lex column writes that the company may struggle to hit its ambitious new targets by relying on internal growth alone.
The question, however, is how much further profitability can be improved for a company unlikely to grow sales rapidly. IBM can tout the benefits of automating processes that currently require human interaction, and an improving economic environment should also help to improve consulting margins for the next two years. But operating margins of 15 per cent in outsourcing and consulting are already better than its US and European competitors. Read more
| About this blog | Blog guide |
Richard Waters has headed the FT's San Francisco bureau since 2002 and covers Google and Microsoft, among other things. A former New York bureau chief for the FT, he is intrigued by Silicon Valley's unique financial and business culture, and is looking forward to covering his second Tech Bust.
Chris Nuttall has been online and messing around with computers for more than 20 years and since 2004 has reported from the FT's San Francisco bureau on semiconductors, video games, consumer electronics and all things interwebby.
Maija Palmer has been writing about technology for the FT since 1999 and is fascinated by cybercrime, privacy and all the other issues of the information society. Based in London, she covers European tech companies and hopes that they won't all get acquired by American rivals.
Robin Kwong is the FT's technology, media and telecoms page editor in London. Formerly he was the Taipei correspondent and wrote about the companies that manufacture the vast majority of the world's computers and gadgets. He is interested in the intricacies of the technology supply chain and how China is increasingly changing the tech landscape.
Tim Bradshaw is the FT's digital media correspondent, and has just moved from London to join our team in San Francisco. He has covered start-ups such as Twitter and Spotify, as well as the online ambitions of more established media companies, such as the BBC iPlayer. He also covers the advertising, marketing and video-game industries. Tim has been writing about technology, business and finance since 2003.
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