This is a serious question. What does IBM, in fact, do? I'm surprised they are still around and apparently relevant. Are they more or less a services and consulting company now?
With each passing CEO it seems to get more and more nebulous. But the mainframes are still technically interesting and they seem to be able to attract and retain quality CPU designers.
Putting consumer grade (aka "commodity") hardware in a datacenter and running your infra on it is a bit of a meme, in the sense that it's not the only way of doing things. It was probably pioneered/popularized by Google but that's because writing great software was their "hammer", ie they framed every computing problem as a software problem. It was probably easier for them (= Jeff Dean) to take mediocre hardware and write a robust distributed system on top instead of the other way around.<p>There is, however, a completely different vision for how web infrastructure should be and that is to have extremely resilient hardware and simple software. That's what a mainframe is. You can write a simple and easy to maintain single process backend program, run it on a mainframe and be fairly confident that it can run without stopping for <i>decades</i>. Everything from the power supply to the CPU is redundant and can be hot swapped without booting the OS. Credit card transactions and banking software run on this model for example (just think about how insanely reliable credit card transactions are).<p>IBM has a monopoly in the second world. You could say the entire field of distributed systems is one big indie effort to break free of IBM's monopoly on computing.
What I think today people do:<p>1. They run complicated infrastructure software, written by third-party developers.<p>2. And they run their own simple programs on top of them.<p>So for example you can rent Kubernetes cluster from AWS and run simple HTTP server. If your server crashes, Kubernetes will restart it, so it's resilient. There will be records in some metrics which will light up some alerts and eventually people will know about it and will fix it.<p>Another example: your simple program does some REST GET query. This query failed for some reason. But that query was intercepted by middleware proxy and that proxy determines that HTTP response was 5xx, so it can retry it. So it retries it few times with properly calibrated duration and eventually gets a response and propagates it back to the simple program. Simple program had no idea about all the stuff happening to make it work, it just threw HTTP query and got a response.<p>There's a lot of complicated machinery to enable simple programs to be part of resilient architecture. That's a goal, anyway.
> There is, however, a completely different vision for how web infrastructure should be and that is to have extremely resilient hardware and simple software.<p>You actually need both, the point of the extremely resilient hardware is that it can act as the single source of truth when you need it - including perhaps hosting <i>some</i> web-based transactions that directly affect your single source of truth. (Calling this a "model" for web-based infrastructure in general would be misleading though: a credit card transaction on the web is not your ordinary website! The web is just an implementation technology here.) Everything else can be ephemeral open systems, which is orders-of-magnitude cheaper.
> Credit card transactions and banking software run on this model for example<p>TSYS is super expensive and is dying out. The current generation of banking software is very much shifting to distributed software across commodity data centers.
Current generation of banking software is <i>expanding</i> on the mainframe:<p><i>IBM Z mainframes play a pivotal role in facilitating 87% of global credit card transactions, nearly $8 trillion in annual payments, and 29 billion ATM transactions each year, amounting to nearly $5 billion per day. Rosamilia highlighted the continuous growth in demand for capacity over the past decade, which has seen inventory expand by 3.5 times.</i><p><a href="https://thesiliconreview.com/2024/04/ibm-new-mainframe-web-transactions" rel="nofollow">https://thesiliconreview.com/2024/04/ibm-new-mainframe-web-t...</a>
Source? Interested in learning more about this
<a href="https://nazymaltbridge.substack.com/i/186393578/technology-infrastructure-provides-structural-advantages-competitors-cannot-easily-replicate" rel="nofollow">https://nazymaltbridge.substack.com/i/186393578/technology-i...</a>
Red Hat OpenShift (IBM) is what a lot of banks have settled on. Red Hat went all in maybe 5+ years ago in capturing those institutions.
Ah, that explains why IBM bought RedHat. Or at least one reason for doing so.
Is that in addition to mainframes or for completely replacing them?
Probably both, to respond to the risk tolerances of any given org.
Both<p>Some stayed at on prem, some pushed code to mainframe VMs in the cloud, some went to OpenShift (mostly on prem from what Ive seen, probably 80-85%).
I work in banking. We provide modern solutions for small local banks in the US. That's how our core runs. It's just Java apps (Spring Boot, Jakarta EE) running in the cloud.
> Credit card transactions and banking software run on this model for example<p>Eh, they <i>can</i> but even a couple of decades ago there was a shift to open platforms. 90s and early 00s, sure, it was mainframe and exotic x86 species like Stratus machines. But even then the power of “throw a ton of cheaper Unix at it” was winning.<p>Banks’ central systems maybe, I have less experience there. IBM did also try for a while to ride the Linux virtualisation wave as well, saying “hey, you can run thousands of Linux instances on a single mainframe”, and I did some work porting IBM software to s390 Linux around 2007.
IIRC the Stratus/Model 88 was Moto 68K chips, not x86? I worked on them for years on wall st. - really nice machines! :-D
x86 servers weren't that common in the 90s and early 200s, that was all sun or the other commercial unix peoples things
Sun was dying in 2000. I was busy deploying BSD and a bit later Linux for all our x86 gear.
Meanwhile in 2000 we only considered Linux good enough to host our MP3 file server and quake for the late nights.<p>All our production stuff was being deployed on Aix, HP-UX, Solaris and Windows NT/2000 Server.<p>Likewise most of my university degree used DG/UX and Solaris, when Red-Hat Linux was first deployed on the labs, it was after the DG/UX server died, and I was already on the fourth year of a five year degree.
Well we were a small startup, and the idea of using AIX was a non-starter. Solaris was lovely, but our E250 was only for mail, and in hindsight we should have stood up a FreeBSD server with dovecot or something instead of a system that we migrated off of a year later.<p>We did use NT/2K internally but that was because we had some who insisted on using SMB via Windows.<p>Such fun times. The <i>nix and </i>nix-like OSes were spreading like fire. I never would have thought I'd ever wrangle them for the majority of my career.
Java was exploding and sun machines were the server platform at the time. Yes, the dot com bubble burst and their stock was in freefall but all the things deployed to sun that survived the bubble didn't just disappear or move to X86 overnight
Well you can say the same about COBOL...<p>Just because things hung around didn't mean that Sun/Solaris/Java were long for this world. Linux/x86 was just too cheap compared to SPARC gear. Even if it wasn't as robust as the Sun gear, it just made too much sense especially if you didn't have any legacy baggage.
In the 90s, perhaps not massively, but gaining ground very early in the 00s. I started my career in 2000 and most of the credit-card related stuff I built until ‘05 was targeted at Windows, Linux and Solaris, with a variety of other Unix platforms depending on the client/project.<p>But the x86 I was referring to in my comment above, Stratus, was (maybe still is?) an exotic attempt to enter the mainframe-reliability space with windows. IIRC it effectively ran two redundant x86 machines in lockstep, keeping them in sync somehow, so that if hardware on one died the other could continue. I have no idea how big their market was, but I know of at least one acquirer/issuer credit card system that ran on that hardware around 2002-3.
A better question would probably what they <i>don't</i> do; just going off the wiki page (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM</a>) for recent history, they're in health care (imaging), weather, video streaming, cloud services, Red Hat, managed infrastructure (which branched off into a company called Kyndryl, which has 90.000 employees in 115 countries), warfare ("In June 2025, IBM was named by a UN expert report as one of several companies "central to Israel's surveillance apparatus and the ongoing Gaza destruction.""), etc etc etc.<p>Basically they do a lot, but they're not showy about it.
IBM has more revenue than Oracle even if we hear way less about it. 5 times smaller than Apple, thou. It also has more employees than Microsoft or Alphabet. But it has tighter profit margins than other tech companies.<p>IBM is not in consumer products nor services so we do not hear about it.
It’s a very different company post the PwC purchase. They have around 1/3 of the revenue from consulting which tends to push the valuation down due to its relative low margin when compared to software. This also inflates the number of employees.
Oracle/TSMC/SpaceX isn’t in consumer products/services, but they are heard about.<p>IBM was declining for 10 years while the rest of the tech related businesses were blowing up, plus IBM does not pay well, so other than it being a business in decline, there wasn’t much to talk about. No one expects anything new from IBM.<p>Also, they had quite a few big boondoggles where they were the bad guys helping swindle taxpayers due to the goodwill from their brand’s legacy, so being a dying rent seeking business as opposed to a growing innovative business was the assumption I had.
Own Red-Hat, thus major contributions to Wayland, GNOME, GCC and Java, at very least.<p>Have their own Java implementation, with capabilities like AOT before OpenJDK got started on Leyden, or even Graal existed, for years had extensions for value types (nowadays dropped), and alongside Azul, cluster based JIT compiler that shares code across JVM instances.<p>IBM i and z/OS are still heavely deployed in many organisations, alongside Aix, and LinuxONE (Linux running on mainframes and micros).<p>Research in quantum computing, AI, design processes, one of the companies that does huge amounts of patents per year across various fields.<p>And yes a services company, that is actually a consortium of IBM owned companies many of each under a different brand (which is followed by "an IBM company").
Early in my career I spent some years working at the biggest bank in Canada, they were (and still are) an enormous IBM customer. Hardware, software, consulting, and probably lots of other things I had no visibility into.<p>Beneath the countless layers of VMs and copious weird purpose built gear like Tandem and Base24 for the ATMs was a whole bunch of true blue z/OS powered IBM mainframes chugging through thousands and thousands of interlocking COBOL programs that do everything from moving files between partner banks all over the world, moving money between accounts, compounding interest, and extracting a metric shitton of every type of fee imaginable.<p>If you know z/OS there's work available until your retirement. Miserable, pointless, banal, and archaic legacy as fuck mainframe work.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tandem_Computers" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tandem_Computers</a><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASE24" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASE24</a><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z/OS" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z/OS</a>
I don't how exaggerated this story is, but one of my buddies did his internship at TD. One of his skip managers told him if you know COBOL there are departments that will give you a blank cheque during salary ngotiation.
Yeah it's hard to say but I believe there's at least some truth to that. I took COBOL off my resume over a decade ago just to combat the volume of recruiters trying to drag me away from the cloud back to on-prem land.<p>A good friend of mine who worked on a CICS based credit card processing application at that bank doubled his salary twice inside of 4 yrs. First by quitting the bank and going to a boutique consultancy to build competing software (which they sold to other banks) and then by quitting that job and coming back to the bank to takeover the abysmal state the CICS app had lapsed into in his absence.<p>And that was circa 2010.<p>One thing that was true of the bank then and I'm sure is true now is that when they see a nail they truly have just the one hammer. When a problem comes along, hit it with a huge sack of cash until it goes away.
I don't think "know COBOL" is enough. I'm pretty sure I can learn COBOL in a week. It's more about "know COBOL and know all this old stuff like CLIs, etc, and know all these old approaches".
Not sure if this is still the case, but Dillard's (US retailer) had a COBOL training program for undergrads as recently as six years ago
Typically it's not just about knowing COBOL as a language, the bottleneck is having real expertise wrt. highly specific, fiddly proprietary frameworks that are implemented <i>on top of</i> COBOL.
Amazing to know AI has eliminated this role that used to have blank cheque.
> purpose built gear like Tandem<p>Tandem! Now there's a name i haven't heard in a long time. A college friend of mine worked with some of their stuff right out of college and I still remember him telling me about it. It seemed like magic, we were both floored with the capabilities.<p>/we were in our early 20s and the inet was just taking off so there were lots of "magic" everywhere
is it that bad?
maybe that is a secret for a long life. I want a job that never disappears :)
Man ... this question hits me really hard. I was absolutely miserable by the end of my years at the bank, and the part that really fucked me up was that (at the time) I could not understand why all my colleagues weren't.<p>Huge generalizations incoming, there are exceptions to every rule, but in my experience there are no nerds who love tech for tech's sake in the banking world. It's entirely staffed by the "C's get degrees" crowd who just want to clock in, clock out, keep their head down, and retire with a nice pension.<p>I wanted to work on sexy technology, wrangle clouds, contribute to open source, and hack in modern languages.<p>I have many friends who are still at that bank 20 yrs later. They're all directors of this that or the other thing, still just grinding out some midlevel whatever career and cruising comfortably. If that ticks all your boxes then by all means go hit up a bank job.<p>By the time I left I couldn't drink enough liquor in a day to rinse the stench of that job off me. If I hadn't managed to slip that place I'd be dead of liver failure by now.<p>It's the secret for a long life for some folks, but it ain't for everybody.
I work for a big international corp. We pay IBM a blankest sum annually because it’s that hard to quantify just how much we rely on their services and licensing costs.<p>Licensing of course just being typical rent seeking behaviour but their services are valuable given the financial impact if one of their solutions goes down on us (which is very rarely)
Everything. They have done for decades, and will do for decades. And what IBM focus on is probably worth looking into.<p>IBM (imho) is in the absolute frontline in quantum computers. One could argue if the number of startups in QC means that there is an actual market or not. Companies that lives on VC or the valuation of their stock.<p>But IBM is not showy, not on the front pages, does not live on VC or stock valuation. IBM makes tons of money decade after decade from customers that are also not showy but makes tons of money. Banks, financial institutions, energy, logistics, health care etc etc. If IBM thinks these companies will benefit from using QC from IBM (and pay tons of money for it), there is quite probably some truth in QC becoming useful in the near future. Years rather than decades.<p>IBM have run the numbers and have decided that spending the money for engineering, research required is outweighs the money possible to earn on QC services. QCs powerful enough to run the QC-supported algorithms these companies need to make more tons of money. And it's probably not breaking RSA or ECC.
> And it's probably not breaking RSA or ECC.<p>Evidence for this is in the number of articles that talk about simulated annealing/quantum annealing (or other optimization problems) w/r/t QC rather than crypto. Sure attention seeking headlines always focus on prime factoring, and the security aspect has a lot more enthusiast interest, but when you look past that into deeper stuff, a lot of the focus is on the optimization.<p>And many industries can dramatically benefit from better optimization - think about how many companies are at their core bin-packers or traveling salesmen.... off the top of my head anything in logistics, airlines, many aspects of the energy sector, and on and on.<p>The flash is in reading secrets, the money is in quantum annealing.
They design their own CPUs, and they sold $15b of hardware last year. Tellum ii in the z17 mainframe is a Samsung 5nm part.<p>What I don't get however is who'd use their custom accelerators for AI inference.
So they had $30 billion in software revenue last year and $15 billion in infrastructure against $20 billion in consulting.
They make $8-9B a year (~90% profit margins) selling software to mainframes, which were deployed ages ago but still have to be maintained because critical COBOL business code was written on their systems - and migration is too riskly/costly.<p>To give you an idea:<p>- of the risk in regulated industries like banking: a UK bank was once fined *$62 million* for botching a mainframe migration and causing downtime.
- of the difficulty and risk in non-tech industries: Australia once spent *$120 million* trying to migrate its social security system off mainframes... and failed.<p>Mainframes are not their only business, of course, but it's a major cash cow that's under appreciated. I, for one, didn't know that business keeps growing.<p>Coincidentally, I wrote about the topic of mainframes with relation to IBM's acquisition of Confluent here today: <a href="https://blog.2minutestreaming.com/p/ibm-confluent-acquisition-mainframes-and-kafka" rel="nofollow">https://blog.2minutestreaming.com/p/ibm-confluent-acquisitio...</a>
You don't read much about IBM here, but this is the wrong site to look for them. A big chunk of IBM's business comes from other businesses <i>outside</i> the IT industry. You're more likely to read about IBM in the Wall Street Journal; Google finds "IBM" at wsj.com about 48000 times (it finds "oracle" there about 30000 times).
They design and build not one but two CPU architectures, s390/Z and POWER.<p>Both have been around for many years, but neither is obsolete, they're just not designed for consumer applications.<p>They still generate $10-15 billion per year in revenue.
Power was used in customer applications a long time ago? I think Apple used them for a while and so did some game consoles?
Yes. Apple used PowerPC, and PowerPC was also in the Xbox 360, PS3, Wii, and Wii U. It was also widespread in embedded sectors like networking, automotive, and aerospace.<p>IBM eventually stepped away from the embedded market and eventually lost their foothold in consoles as well. While Raptor did offer Power9 systems at a somewhat accessible price point, the IBM-produced CPUs were still fundamentally enterprise-grade hardware, meaning they retained the high costs and "big iron" features of server tech.
Sort of, in the form of PowerPC, which was an Apple-IBM-Motorola (“AIM”) collaboration. It’s closely related to IBM’s Power line, but more like a predecessor than a sibling.
They also designed the Cell CPU used in Nintendo Wiis, among others.
The designed many, many more CPU architectures.
I was surprised to find out they still have hardware repair technicians (extremely expensive but reliable: ~$400 per computer around 2022 iirc)<p>But yes they’re mostly enterprise/services/mainframes not anything overly consumer
No, IBM has Unisys contractors, not employees. All the techs I’ve worked with from IBM have been a nightmare. One dropped an entire drive array on the ground, and tried to install it despite it being bent and no longer fitting on the rack. I have been acquired by IBM twice. They are a nightmare, horrible company.
I own their shares due to their Quantum Computing group<p>You can see their roadmap here:<p><a href="https://www.ibm.com/roadmaps/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ibm.com/roadmaps/</a>
When you’re that large and established it’s very hard to die. I expect IBM to exist in some form pretty much forever
my company uses as400 and DB2 and pay for their servers. So they still make money from hardware too
Mainframes and consulting.
They own things like:<p>1. Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which is by far the most commonly deployed Linux variant among US Enterprise orgs.<p>2. Ansible<p>3. Podman<p>4. Hashicorp Terraform / Consul / Packer / Vagrant / Nomad / Etc.<p>5. Giant B2B services arm<p>6. Mainframe, which a lot of science organizations / governments / credit card companies still run. Sometimes you may have an IBM rep show up to replace a part on the mainframe you didn't even know was broken - very reliable, fault tolerant system.<p>7. The only service I know where you can rent Quantum computing time in the cloud<p>8. Probably a ton of other things I'm not even aware of.<p>9. Red Hat OpenShift - so if you're big enterprise running k8s on prem, there's a good chance it's OpenShift, especially in banking / finance / government.
They exist to swallow up profitable companies, extract any “unnecessary” overhead (like benefits, PTO, pay that isn’t rock bottom), and package into large enterprise licensing agreements.
I was shocked when IBM acquired Red Hat a few years ago. I had silently assumed at the time that Red Hat was far bigger than IBM nowadays, so the reverse would have made more sense to me.
They sell (managed) database appliances (on z and Power) and associated software (think the platform/HANA parts of SAP) - all state-of-the-art in the late 1990s but since then put on maintenance mode and it shows (a bit like oracle...).
Their hardware is still cool custom built silicon and imo state of the art, but since k8s, high-speed-network and multi-TB-machines (for <100k$) are here and run Linux no new venture buys into that anymore (except for gulf states...).
Before, when the competition was a cluster of Itanium/VMS or Sparc/Solaris and the associated contract, noone bought into that either at scale but also noone using IBM had a very compelling reason to switch everything around.<p>So essentially they sell new hardware and "support" to customers who have been in need to process tabular, multi-GB databases since when a PC was 128MB memory and have been doing electronic record-keeping since the 1970s. They also allow their ~hostages~, ehm, customers who trust them with their data to run processing near the data at a cost/in a cloud style billing model. That is so expensive though that every large IBM-shop has built an elaborate layer of JVMs, Unix and mirror-databases around their IBM appliances. Lately they bought Redhat and hashicorp and confluent thus taking a cut from the "support" of the abominiations of IT systems they helped birth for some more time to come (also remember the alternative JVM OpenJ9, do you all?).<p>I think the later a company started using centralized electronic record keeping, the higher the likelyhood they are not paying IBM anymore: commercial banks, governments and insurance started digitizing in the 60s (with custom software) and if the companies are old (or in US-friendly petrostates) they are all IBM customers. Corps using ERP or PLM offerings (so manufacturing and retail chains which are younger than banks) used to start digitizing a little later (Walmart only was founded in the 60s and electronic CAD started in the 80s) and while they likely used IBM in the past (SAP was big on DB2) they might not use it anymore (also it helps they usually bought the ERP or PLM from someone else). New Companies whose sole business was to run a digital-platform started on Unix (see Amazon who successfully fought to ditch Oracle even) or just built their whole platform (Google). If those companies predate Unix they usually fought hard to get rid of IBM (Microsoft, Amadeus)<p>Consulting/outsourcing services have been spun out to Kyndryl, so nowadays IBM only sells hardware, support for their products and ostensibly has some people left to develop their products... The days when that was a big thing and IBM produced all the stuff they sell support for now, have been long gone. A fun link to see how their "product development" operates nowadays is this discussion to bring gitlab-runners to z/OS: <a href="https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-runner/-/work_items/27526" rel="nofollow">https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-runner/-/work_items/275...</a> - tl;dr "hey you opensource company, we are IBM and managed to pay someone to port a go compiler to z/OS. Now we have a customer who wants to use gitlab with z/OS. Would you like to make your software part of our product offering?".
A fun fact is that - even within IBM - access to the real mainframe seems to be very limited which shows a bit in the discussion linked above and also with an ex-Kyndryl-person saying: "oh, I once had a contract where we replaced the mainframe and we ran that on Linux-boxes inside IBM, because it was just cheaper that way. Just the big reporting was a bit slow, but the reliability was just fine"