IBM has strengthened itself as a cloud and blockchain leader

Finally, IBM has brought its revenue slide to a halt following five and a half years. According to the company, it has reinforced its position as the leading enterprise cloud and blockchain leader.

For the fourth quarter of 2017, the Armonk giant posted revenues of $22.5 billion, which is 3.5% more than its revenues last year at $21.7bn. Of this figure, 40% was comprised of the technology services and cloud platforms bucket, while 24% came from cognitive solutions and 18% was derived from global business services. Martin Schroeter, senior vice president for IBM global markets, said, “We play an important role in running our clients’ most critical processes. And now with the IBM Cloud, which is built for the enterprise, each of the 10 largest global banks, nine of the top 10 retailers and eight of the top 10 airlines are cloud-as-a-service clients.”

The company continues to make progress in emerging areas like blockchain. The blockchain set of technologies allows its clients to simplify complex, end-to-end processes in a better way than it used to be. It requires the attributes of immutability, permissioning and scalability, and IBM is already performing thousands of transactions per second. Looking ahead, it wants to help clients use data and AI to build smarter businesses.

The quarter’s highlights for IBM were the launch of IBM Cloud Private, removing reference to Bluemix and moving it forward as IBM Cloud. IBM is also extending its partnership with Salesforce, naming it a preferred customer engagement platform for sales and service.