Two things you didn't know about IBM: More than 200,000 of its employees are located in the Netherlands, and it is the third largest vendor of software applications in the world.
Okay, the first one isn’t quite right. Those 200,000 employees in the Netherlands are just on paper—it’s a perfectly legal tax trick. But the second one is true, says Forrester Research analyst Andrew Bartels. By next year, IBM’s business applications will be worth about $8 billion, behind SAP and Oracle and ahead of Microsoft, excluding Office sales. “IBM just doesn’t want to talk about business because it doesn’t want to make its partners uncomfortable,” says Bartels.
IBM on Monday launched a campaign to overhaul the company's work and shift it to the cloud, investing $1 billion in new cloud capabilities. The effort includes moving its software portfolio to the cloud.
