IBM Faces a Crisis In the Cloud - Businessweek

Excerpt from an IBM cloud reality check

"In its most recent quarter, IBM’s hardware sales fell 17 percent, its services sales dropped 4 percent, and its total revenue fell 4 percent to $23.7 billion. Sales in what IBM defines as “growth markets” fell 9 percent. The company didn’t have the courage to break out sales in non-growth markets.
The acquisition of SoftLayer shows that IBM knows it needs to engage in some hand-to-hand industry combat if it wants to remain relevant. Having sold its disk drive business to Asia, IBM is now renting disk drives by the hour for pennies. If you want to be a technology company in 2013, that’s the sort of thing you must do."

IBM Faces a Crisis In the Cloud - Businessweek