Over the years, IBM has spun off so many businesses that you might wonder what they
even do anymore. I mean, they literally invented the personal computer, but they sold their entire
PC division to Lenovo back in 2004. They stopped making consumer printers in 91,
computer chips in 2014, and Lotus Notes in 2018. So despite the fact you probably haven't
bought an IBM product in years, how the heck are they still pulling in over 70 billion dollars
in annual revenue instead of going the way of the passenger pigeon? Well, like many companies,
IBM still has its fingers in what made it successful in the first place, IT. But it has shifted its
focus to areas it thinks will be more profitable in the modern age. And it makes sense when you
think about it. Although PCs were big blues bread and butter for a long time, they became
commodity goods over the years with relatively low profit margins. But these days, IBM is focusing
on services rather than selling physical products. One huge area where IBM is trying to become an
industry leader is hybrid cloud. You're probably familiar with cloud computing in general. You
use it every time you rely on Google servers to give you information about a local restaurant,
or you ask your favorite virtual assistant what the weather is like outside. Hybrid cloud is a
system that leverages public cloud systems that run public facing services like the example I just
gave you in combination with an organization's own private cloud. A good example of a business
that could use hybrid cloud is an online retailer like lttstore.com. Sensitive financial information
could be kept on the retailer's premises with robust security measures to foil attackers.
Meanwhile, much of the store's data and transaction processing could be handled by a public cloud
system so that consumers aren't waiting forever for a page to load or for a payment to go through.
And the retailer could even buy more processing time and storage on the public cloud during
heavy shopping periods such as the holiday season, making it a flexible solution that is more scalable.
Because it's usually much cheaper for organizations to just buy the cloud computing
muscle they need rather than hosting everything on site, IBM saw a huge opportunity to profit by
offering their own infrastructure as a service. In fact, IAAS is a common initialism for products
that offer cloud infrastructure as needed. Although IBM has a long way to catch up in
this space compared to Amazon's AWS and Microsoft's Azure in terms of market share,
the explosive growth in cloud computing, fueled by higher data speeds and consumer demand,
makes it easy to understand why IBM is focusing on it rather than slinging PCs at Radio Shack.
The other area IBM is really focusing on is artificial intelligence. You've probably seen
those commercials for something called IBM Watson while watching TV. Watson is a natural language
AI that, believe it or not, was first designed to answer questions on Jeopardy. But since then,
it's expanded to support everyone from medical providers who want to ask it about the likelihood
of a certain diagnosis, to large customer service departments who want to use Watson to
replace their human workers in call centers. Unsurprisingly, this all means that IBM is
courting business from large corporations like Citigroup and Verizon who want to automate their
operations as much as possible rather than relying on human analysts. And Big Blue is also hoping
that Watson's focus on natural language processing will give it a leg up in a quickly crowding
AI field. IBM has actually been working on AI for a long time. In fact, it demonstrated an AI
that could play checkers all the way back in 1956. And since IBM has been focused on doing its own
research for decades, they feel confident that AI and cloud are their ways forward. In fact,
IBM is actually spinning off a large part of its more traditional IT business, which includes
hosting network services and taking care of infrastructure for large organizations as a
separate company called Kindrel later on in 2021. So it's clear that IBM has big ambitions. I just
hope Watson doesn't replace the Techquickie staff one day. Or maybe they do. So thanks for
watching guys. If you liked this video, hit like, hit subscribe and hit us up in the comment section
with your suggestions for topics that we should cover in the future.