2021 Outlook Assessment: IBM

IBM continues to demonstrate growth within critical areas of cloud infrastructure across IT locations, data storage and integration, advanced analytics and automation powered by Watson AI, and providing customers with innovative solutions to support digital transformation efforts for companies worldwide. Further, IBM has refocused its business sharply around hybrid cloud and AI – two demonstrably high-value and high-margin businesses with strong growth prospects. Assuming IBM is able to successfully leverage the RedHat acquisition (and it is already showing promising signs), its longer-term outlook remains positive as it looks set to gain significant cloud market share in highly-regulated or high-complexity enterprise use cases.