Since its inception, IBM has bet on the big enterprise. A stalwart of the industrial age, IBM provided much of the technology its industrial counterparts needed as they embraced the first computer era — and has maintained a significant presence within enterprise organizations ever since.
As technologies evolved, IBM went through its ups-and-downs as it adapted to changing enterprise needs and appetites, but its focus on meeting the big needs of the big enterprise never wavered.
Over the last decade, however, IBM’s enterprise customers have been under assault. Nimble, disruptive start-ups have used their willingness to experiment with new technologies and business models to unsettle and unseat their slower-moving and risk-averse enterprise competitors.
While their initial response was slow and awkward, enterprise organizations are now emulating the cloud-native and agile approaches of their much smaller competitors — and adopting the technologies that go with these approaches. Over the last several years, this has left IBM — and many of its legacy tech industry peers such as Oracle and SAP — scrambling to maintain relevance in a post-industrial world.
Last week, IBM made its bid for continued relevance by putting forth its vision for the future at its new annual conference, dubbed Think. Its bet, which in light of its history may be unsurprising, is on the continued relevance of the large enterprise — but only if they become what it calls “incumbent disruptors.”
