Roy Illsley, Principal Analyst, Ovum Software
IBM has announced that it will invest more than $1bn in the new IBM Watson Group, as well as $1.2bn to expand its global cloud computing footprint to 40 data centers worldwide in 15 countries across five continents. On January 23, 2014, IBM also announced that it has reached a definitive agreement with Lenovo to sell the Chinese company the majority of its x86 server business in a $2.3bn deal that includes System x, BladeCenter and Flex System blade servers and switches, x86-based Flex integrated systems, NeXtScale and iDataPlex servers and associated software, blade networking, and maintenance operations.
This represents the biggest ever technology acquisition by a Chinese company, and sees IBM exit server manufacturing in all but the System z mainframes, Power Systems, Storage Systems, Power-based Flex servers, and PureApplication and PureData appliances markets.