IBM Mainframe Business Jumps 67%

https://newsroom.ibm.com/2026-01-28-IBM-RELEASES-FOURTH-QUARTER-RESULTS

22•belter•2h ago

Comments

zafka•2h ago

What jumps out at me is the use of the "constant currency" term. I do not think I have seen that before - Admittedly, I do not study a lot of financials. Is this something that we are going to see a lot of now, due to devaluation of the dollar?

tiffanyh•2h ago

It’s pretty common actually with Fortune 500 to report that way, and has been for a long time.

mywittyname•1h ago

This is the standard for all financials, they just don't normally call it out as such.

It just means that they are assuming a fixed exchange rate for currencies over a period of time (often a month, quarter, or year), rather than reporting foreign income/holdings in current market value dollars.

I'm not an accountant, but I did do dev work for exactly this to align Netsuite with internal dashboards for reporting.

jmclnx•1h ago

Interesting, I wonder why, I can only guess AI ? But I was unaware Mainframes were used for AI.

mywittyname•1h ago

> But I was unaware Mainframes were used for AI.

IBM was front and center with AI long before the AI bubble.

- Watson won jeopardy in 2011. And IBM launched several successful AI products using the tech.

- Deep Blue beat Kasparov in chess in '97. They also had other NN-based systems for playing games.

snovymgodym•1h ago

Wasn't Watson basically a parlor trick though?

stg22•59m ago

It wasn't a parlor trick and could have evolved into a useful product doing a small, basic subset of what LLMs do today. The problem was IBM's leadership didn't have the slightest understanding of the technology, thought they'd invented ChatGPT and pushed it into applications far beyond its potential, e.g. diagnosing cancer.

weare138•14m ago

Yeah it kind of was. Watson was essentially an NLP search engine.

verdverm•25m ago

Was, IBM hired me to teach watson law, what I saw as a mess, more management than developers. I was laid off 5 weeks after starting, the project was cancelled within the year

IBM is too dysfunctional to innovate like Big Tech has been

belter•1h ago

Nothing do to with AI. Its the upgrade to the new Z Generation.

https://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/sg248579.html https://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redbooks/pdfs/sg248579.pdf

Nobody dropping Mainframes.

sillywalk•56m ago

The last 2 generations of IBM Z CPUs have "AI" inference acceleration built in. One of the use-cases was real-time credit-card fraud detection.

IBM also has a PCIe add-in card for AI called Spyre, that's also available for POWER11 systems.

https://www.ibm.com/new/announcements/telum-ii

https://research.ibm.com/blog/spyre-for-z

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