IBM is betting on a ‘hybrid cloud’

The Motley Fool Take

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IBM’s legacy business lines have struggled for years, and that’s been keeping the stock depressed. But it’s spinning off its managed infrastructure business by the end of this year. This will leave the new entity more focused on what it describes as “the $1 trillion hybrid cloud opportunity.”

While IBM offers a public cloud platform similar to market leaders Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, it’s focusing instead on hybrid cloud computing. IBM is betting that its base of large customers will benefit from mixing on-premises hardware and public cloud services instead of simply going all-in on a public cloud.

IBM’s total cloud revenue increased 19% in 2020 to $25.1 billion. In its first quarter of 2021, the century-old tech giant returned to total revenue growth…