Sales sag at IBM despite cloud and security success

Big Blue suffers another quarterly sales drop but highlights progress in "strategic imperatives" such as cloud, big data and security

Cloud, mobility, big data and security were star performers for IBM in another otherwise lacklustre set of quarterly numbers for the IT giant.

Although Big Blue actually topped analyst expectations for its fiscal Q2, revenues fell back two per cent year on year to $24.4.bn as the New York-listed behemoth was shackled by falling services and hardware sales.

GAAP net profit rose 28 per cent to $4.1bn in the three months ending 30 June.

With its hardware business flatlining, IBM is pushing heavily into areas such as cloud and big data, this week announcing an historic partnership with Apple around applications.

Hardware sales tumbled 11 per cent to $3.3bn during the quarter, while revenues from its Global Services arm fell one per cent to $13.9bn. Software sales inched up one per cent to $6.5bn.

There were some bright spots, however, with the annual runrate from cloud delivered as a service virtually doubling to $2.8bn year on year. Business analytics sales rose seven per cent, mobile revenues more than doubled and revenue from security - a sector in which Gartner now believes IBM is a top-three player - flew up 20 per cent.

Revenues from EMEA fell by three per cent to $7.9bn, adjusting for local currency.

"In the second quarter, we made further progress on our transformation. We performed well in our strategic imperatives around cloud, big data and analytics, security and mobile," said IBM chief executive Ginni Rometty (pictured).