Lenovo To Buy IBM's Server Business For $2.3 Billion

itwbennett writes "Well, that was fast. Earlier this week the rumor mill was getting revved up about a potential sale of IBM's x86 server business, with Lenovo, Dell, and Fujitsu reportedly all interested in scooping it up. On Thursday, Lenovo Group announced it has agreed to buy IBM's x86 server hardware business and related maintenance services for $2.3 billion. The deal encompasses IBM's System x, BladeCenter and Flex System blade servers and switches, x86-based Flex integrated systems, NeXtScale and iDataPlex servers and associated software, blade networking and maintenance operations. IBM will retain its System z mainframes, Power Systems, Storage Systems, Power-based Flex servers, and PureApplication and PureData appliances." SlashBI has some words from an analyst about why Lenovo wants the x86 product line more than IBM does.

Over 30 years

[Koen Lefever]

I remember thinking "too little, too late" when IBM launched its x86 line (the IBM 5150 PC with 8088 CPU) in 1981.

Damn, over 30 years later and we're still stuck with a variant of that architecture!

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[account_deleted]

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Re:ugly truth, they never stood a chance.

[Anonymous Coward]

tl;dr: commodity hardware and software, over time, takes over everything, and IBM lacks a unique selling point

frankly I'm astonished that they outlived Sun, although both were obviously doomed

taking bets on how long before Lenovo buys the IBM trademark? Or will they not even bother?

Re:Chinese Rule!!!

[TheloniousToady]

Look at it this way: the Chinese may feel rich enough to pay $2.3 billion for server business, but only Americans feel rich enough to pay $3.2 billion for a thermostat business. So, who has the bigger Nest egg?

Distributed Systems? Bah!

[shadowknot]

The truth is that IBM's primary server market has never been its x86 offerings. The pSeries and System z market is much more lucrative what with engine licensing (CP, IFL etc) and massively expensive platform specific operating systems (z/OS, z/VSE, z/TPF, AIX etc) along with decades old products like CICS powering the vast majority of the financial world. I work closely with a contractor who worked for IBM for nearly four decades and his attitude to the distributed world is likely representative of a general antipathy to x86 on the server side within IBM (though I have no evidence other than him to back that up!) I suspect though, that the fact they can focus on "real" servers on the hardware side will probably be seen as good by most in Endicott.

Re:Over 30 years

[nojayuk]

The 8086 family including the 8088 8-bit bus version were available to buy in commercial quantities at a time when the MC68000 was still a hangar queen with dev boards running at half the speed of the planned production machines (we tried overclocking our dev board from 4MHz to the production speed of 8MHz, didn't work). The Z8000 was even more of a pipe dream.

In addition the 8086/8088 worked with all the 8080-family bus chips like the serial port, parallel port, interrupt controller, 8087 maths chip etc. The MC68k had to fake all that functionality with separate and expensive silicon (no affordable FPGA chips back then). Software -- the 8086 was deliberately designed with an 8080-family structure of registers and memory access internally which made it easy to port existing CP/M code over to the new platform and Intel wrote compilers and provided other tools to make that job easy. The MC68k was a dream to write new code for but it took a lot more effort to get something, anything working on it.