Petroc Taylor
Research expert covering global developments in the use of data
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IBM reorganized its business reporting segments for 2021. This reflects a streamlining of its operations, as well as the separation of the firm’s managed infrastructure services business Kyndryl, which formally separated from IBM in November 2021. The software segment, previously titled cloud & cognitive software, generated over 24 billion U.S. dollars in 2021. This figure includes revenue generated by Red Hat, the AI open-source software company that IBM acquired for 34 billion U.S. dollars in 2019. A further 17 billion U.S. dollars was generated by the company’s consulting segment in 2021, providing clients with consulting, business process, and application management services, specializing in AI workflows and applications for hybrid cloud environments. The firm’s third largest segment by revenue in 2021 was infrastructure, accounting for over 14 billion U.S. dollars. The segment includes hybrid cloud infrastructure, as well as infrastructure support services.IBM’s innovations
IBM is responsible for some of the most groundbreaking inventions in the technology industry: the automated teller machine (ATM), the hard disk drive (HDD), the Universal Product Code (UPC), and dynamic random-access memory (DRAM). The company continues to innovate, ranking first among companies with the most U.S. patents granted and a leading owner of machine learning and AI patents. Alongside this, IBM has committed itself to environmental leadership, addressing climate change, energy efficiency, product design, and the use of materials. A key part of this involves IBM’s energy conservation projects, which include virtualization and cooling efficiency projects in data center environments.
