IBM is huge, and it's hard to give a general impression around the whole company that makes any sense. I can only really speak about CDS (the division Compose is joining and Cloudant is a part of) but I can say it's a really exciting place to work. CDS is about as fast-moving as you can get in a company this large, and the leadership really understands the shift to SaaS. We have a great team and a lot of autonomy to make decisions outside of the general corporate superstructure.
I'm biased but think it speaks highly that Cloudant people (Adam Kocoloski and Derek Schoettle) were tapped to lead this group.
It's a huge place, but I agree with ahoff, having come over along with the Cloudant acquisition. I feel pretty good about our little corner of IBM in CDS (cloud data services). It's not a bad place to end up if you're at a data management startup.
I think IBM is turning around. It missed the cloud shift by quite a few years, but they know it, and they are re-inventing themselves, which is quite commendable for a large 100+ year old company.
HN often lives in the startup + Facebook + Google + latest tech trend bubble. But there is a whole world of enterprise + government (DoD) tech world out there that exists, but it is not talked much about here, unless it is being made fun of perhaps.
IBM is no longer just focused on enterprise and government. There's a big focus now on startups. Take a look at the Bluemix Garage where there's IBM engineers embedded in Galvanize in SF to work with startups but also help enterprises bridge the gap and learn from them; and also look at digital.nyc and tech.london. Both are IBM initiatives. So... IBM today isn't like the IBM that most people imagine and I am sure that the IBM of tomorrow will be completely different. You don't get to be over 100 years old and a tech company unless you can reinvent yourself to stay relevant.
IBM are increasingly pissing off their customers since they retrenched a good portion of their experienced workforce. I have a friend who is a CIO of a large company in Australia and he is increasingly getting annoyed with IBM's SAP support and is hunting around for alternatives.
He probably won't move from IBM completely, but they'll be getting less and less business from him. I mean, the other day their entire datacentre's network link was flapping, for hours and hours. It wasn't just his company that was affected, it was affecting even larger companies.
IBM's ability to deliver is going down the plughole. They've always been very expensive, but have been able to justify it because they were able to handle your issues effectively. That's increasingly showing to be not the case.
I just migrated from working directly on the IBM Mainframe in COBOL (gasp) to my true love of .Net and JS (yep, both of them) within the same company. I have been on a number of greenfield projects with IBM and quite frankly, my opinion of them differs based on the area of the company you are dealing with. For instance, I love dealing with the CI guys at Urbancode Deploy, whereas getting similar information from their Rational counterparts (Rational Team Concert) was like pulling teeth. Pretty much every experience I had with the Rational teams was terrible because they would hide information to sell more consulting services or additional products (even though they guaranteed the feature was available on our existing license). I despise the documentation sifting and information gathering required to use IBM products (developer works is a terrible site). However, I have much respect for the engineering that goes into those products and it is a joy when you get to work directly with their engineers to solve a problem. Good luck compose, I hope you get to be autonomous like Urbancode and not stuck in the sand of the Rational teams.
My impression of IBM as a place to work is that it's hopelessly bureaucratic in a way that no simple reform is going to be able to fix.
For instance. Once upon a time I had an internship there, working with a particular product dealing with server management. As part of the setup process required to customize servers, users were directed to go to a random university user's home directory to download one particular older version of some open-source boot-utility software (newer versions wouldn't work). This is, of course, a terrifying distribution mechanism.
Actually hosting and distributing this file wasn't something that IBM people were willing to do; you'd need to run it through the Lawyers. (This probably feeds a Not Invented Here syndrome.)
That said! At least the internship was with the Software division. The way I heard it, Services was 90% of the revenue and Software was 90% of the profit. Things are a lot better in Software. Still a damnable maze of cubicle farms, though.
My impression is that they have almost fully divested from hardware and are doing whatever they can to boost their consulting, services, cloud & analytics businesses - hence this latest acquisition, on top of many other cloud purchases.
This is smart, given that hardware is a commodity with low and falling margins, whereas it's very hard to price heterogeneous services such as consulting, integration, etc. They've done some shady things to cut costs, but they needed to pivot pretty drastically in order to maintain their position and restart a growth cycle.
Ultimately, I think the "big data" market is overhyped, and that IBM is playing into this hype. People are gobbling up data storage and analytics services left and right, but are the valuations equivalent to the value added to a company by storing and sorting a ton of (potentially useless) data?
IBM is not a company, it's a collection of fiefdoms. Depending on who your contacts are and a whole bunch of Game of Thrones like machinations within the company, they can be wonderful or absolutely abhorrent.
Between Alamaden (San Jose) and Yorktown Heights (NY) in the US, IBM is one of the last few industrial basic sciences/engineering labs in the US, resembling Bell Labs and Xerox PARC from a few decades ago.
I'm personally a really big fan of IBM's hardware, particularly their POWER-based systems. IBM hardware simply never dies, and I've witnesses firsthand the "nobody was ever fired for buying IBM" phenomenon. Lenovo's IBM-derived products (i.e. their ThinkPads and related workstations/PCs) are also among my favorites by way of their IBM heritage; ThinkPads in particular are known for being among the best laptops for FOSS operating systems (GNU/Linux, the BSDs, etc.) when it comes to out-of-the-box hardware support, and many of them will even run custom BIOSes like Coreboot.
I'm not as much of a fan of their software, though that's probably because I haven't really used a whole lot of it.
They're a conglomerate that does three things: sell products; sell services; license software & hardware intellectual property. They made $92 billion doing this last year. They derive this stuff through a combination of several billion a year in R&D, acquisitions of successful companies, and acquisitions of companies with strategically useful I.P.. Unlike most tech companies, they've weathered decades worth of storms.
Unfortunately for them, they suffer that big company type of thinking that kills innovation. It's why they've had to acquire more. They're were also late to the cloud market. Their last CEO also practically ran it into the ground to prop up stock price before exiting with almost $300 million personal gain. They're facing hard times and it will be interesting to see how they adapt. Their recent push for innovation and agile is interesting. Hopefully a sign of things to come.
I have used Bluemix and generally like it. I only stopped using it when I was accepted into Microsoft's Bizspark program (Azure has good Linux support and is also easy to use). The days are long over that I would lease raw servers. AWS, Azure, Bluemix, Google Cloud Services, etc. all provide great ancillary services.
IBM makes some of the worst, most bloated, buggy and overpriced software I every used: RAD and WAS. They are so bad they are a torture on the developer. There are no technical reasons for choosing them. I get angry just thinking about it.
