RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK – Shares of IBM (NYSE: IBM) rose some 5% in after-hours trading Wednesday thanks to a quarterly report that beat Wall Street analysts’ expectations and a forecast of more growth ahead. Playing a key role in that is Raleigh-based Red Hat and its cloud technology.
So said Chair and CEO Arvind Krishna.
“Our point of view is clear. Hybrid cloud and AI are the two most transformational enterprise technologies of our time,” he explained, according to a transcript of the call provided by Motely Fool.“Hybrid cloud is already becoming the dominant architecture for enterprise. According to a recent survey by the Harris Poll, 77% of businesses surveyed that they have adopted hybrid cloud for their organizations with data located across multiple clouds, on-premise, or at the edge. Hybrid cloud is about offering clients a platform that can drive value across these different environments. Our platform based on Red Hat allows our clients to consume software driven by open-source innovation.”
CFO Jim Kavanaugh was especially bullish on Red Hat as a key contributor to IBM’s growth in cloud revenue.
“Red Hat revenue all-in grew 18%,” he noted.
“As a leader in open-source technologies for the enterprise, Red Hat’s performance was again fueled by market share gains across RHEL [Red Hat Enterprise Linux], OpenShift, and Ansible this quarter. With our enterprise incumbency and global scale, we continue to see an increase in large deals, as well as strong cross-sell and upsell across Red Hat solutions. Automation revenue grew 3%. This quarter’s performance reflects continued adoption in areas like AIOps and management and integration, while we’re also wrapping a strong acquisition content from last year.”
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