International Business Machines


IBM

recently launched IBM Cloud Multizone Region (MZR) in Brazil, marking its first MZR in Latin America.

The launch of MZR in Brazil will help business enterprises safely deploy mission-critical applications and workloads and assist in addressing data sovereignty requirements, added IBM. Last year, IBM had launched its cloud regions in Toronto and Osaka.

IBM further added that its MZRs are designed to have three or more data center zones wherein each is an Availability Zone. As a result, in case of an adverse event at any data center, only that center will be affected while the others remain fully functional.

The company’s MZRs also comprise a suite of Platform as a Service (PaaS) solutions along with IBM Cloud Satellite and Red Hat OpenShift platform on IBM Cloud. The additional features will aid enterprises in deploying architecture and critical workloads across hybrid cloud environments.

Moreover, IBM underscored its commitment toward reducing carbon emissions. The tech giant added that it was leveraging innovative technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI), hybrid cloud and quantum computing to tackle various climate change concerns including the increasing carbon footprint of data centers and cloud workloads. IBM is working on achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2030.

IBM’s Hybrid Cloud Focus

IBM remains focused on growing its hybrid cloud business. The company’s launch of latest cloud region in Brazil is part of its strategy to accelerate hybrid cloud adoption.

Hybrid cloud market is anticipated to witness a CAGR of 18.73% between 2021 and 2026 and touch a value of $145 billion,

per a Mordor Intelligence report

.

Globally, business enterprises were promptly shifting their workloads to cloud even before the COVID-19 crisis. Migration to cloud offers enterprises increased scalability, faster deployment, cost efficiency and higher security. The pandemic only accelerated this shift. For cloud service providers like IBM, this underscores massive revenue growth opportunity.

To capitalize on this opportunity, IBM recently launched

IBM Cloud Satellite

, which will render its hybrid cloud services generally available across all environments including on-premises location along with any cloud platform as well as at the edge environment.

Notably, the Red Hat acquisition, which is IBM’s largest cloud-based buyout helped the company bolster its competitive position in the hybrid cloud market and boost its containerized software capabilities.

For 2020, revenues from Red Hat increased 18% on a normalized basis. Currently, more than 2,800 clients are utilizing Red Hat and IBM’s hybrid cloud platform.

Last year, IBM acquired Instana, Nordcloud, Expertus and TruQua Enterprises LLC to bolster its hybrid cloud vision.

As part of its hybrid cloud vision, IBM will spin off (tax free) Managed Infrastructure Services, a unit of its Global Technology Services segment into a new company by the end of 2021.

However, escalating costs on hybrid cloud platform amid increasing competition in the cloud domain from dominant players like

Amazon

’s

AMZN

Amazon Web Services,

Microsoft

’s

MSFT

Azure and

Alphabet

’s

GOOGL

Google Cloud are major headwinds. Also, higher debt levels amid extensive restructuring endeavors put pressure on the stock.

IBM currently carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). You can see


the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

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