IBM reported strong second quarter results, a revenue pop for its infrastructure business due to its new mainframe system and a growing backlog for its AI business.
IBM updated its quantum computing roadmap heading into IBM Quantum Starling, a large-scale fault-tolerant quantum system in 2029.
IBM said quantum computing will hit quantum advantage in 2026 starting with chemistry use cases followed by optimization and mathematical computation.
IBM CEO Arvind Krishna said there is no law that enterprise AI has to be expensive, pegged to large language models and experimental.
IBM reported better-than-expected first quarter results and maintained its outlook in what CEO Arvind Krishna called a "fluid" macroeconomic environment.
While many folks think of mainframes as creaky old systems designed to process transactions without downtime, the z systems are big business for IBM and a strong upgrade cycle. In addition, IBM has reinvented the mainframe a few times for cloud workloads and now AI.
IBM said it has acquired data and AI consultant Hakkoda in a deal that will give it data migration platform services. Hakkoda is a big partner for Snowflake.
The plan for IBM is to leverage DataStax's technologies and combine them with its Granite large language models. IBM will also be a bigger player in vector databases and leveraging unstructured data for enterprises.
