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IBM is splitting into two public companies, with a spin-off handling the firm’s legacy IT infrastructure work, allowing IBM to focus on new high-margin businesses, particularly cloud services and AI.
The 109-year-old company announced the news this week, which follows CEO Arvind Krishna’s longterm plan to streamline the sprawling business. Krishna took the reins of IBM in April 2020 after working on its $34 billion acquisition of open source software firm Red Hat from 2018 onwards. Red Hat’s software is key to IBM’s new hybrid cloud offerings.
In a call with analysts, Krishna presented the split as the latest in a long line of divestments by IBM, as…