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.
