Introduction

With Watson 1.0, IBM deviated from the silicon valley mantra, fail fast, as it took nearly a decade for the company to pivot off of its original vision. In our view, a different dynamic is in play today with Watson 2.0 – i.e. watsonx. IBM’s deep research in AI and learnings from its previous mistakes, have positioned the company to be a major player in the Generative AI era. Specifically, in our opinion, IBM has a leading technological foundation, a robust and rapidly advancing AI stack, a strong hybrid cloud position (thanks to Red Hat), an expanding ecosystem and a consulting organization with deep domain expertise to apply AI in industry-specific use cases.  

In this Breaking Analysis we share our takeaways and perspectives from a recent trip to IBM’s research headquarters. To do so we collaborate with analyst friends in theCUBE Collective, Sanjeev Mohan, Tony Baer and Merv Adrian. We’ll also share some relevant ETR spending data to frame the conversation.