During the last few years the situation of IBM as a provider of web store systems has not looked very good. In Finland, the situation with partners has steadily become worse, and it is not easy to recommend IBM, even though the system itself is quite capable.

Now IBM has sold a remarkable collection of products to an Indian company HCL Technologies. HCL has become known especially as a partner in big outsourcing cases. This business case seems to be similar.

For HCL, this may be mostly about buying customers. With this deal, HCL gets 5000 customers to which they can provide many kinds of support services.

A quote from Bloomberg’s article: “The asset-sale comes as IBM is seeking to become a leader in the hybrid cloud market, which combines software and services delivered over the public Internet with similar offerings run on companies’ own servers and data centers. In October, the Armonk, New York-based company agreed to buy Red Hat Inc., a specialist in this area, for $33 billion.”

Perhaps the fact, that the stock price of HCL declined five (5) percent after the deal was published, describes the transaction best.

The deal suits very well into the IBM story line. The company pursuits to expand its offering in many kinds of cloud services and service related infrastructures. To some extend, “old fashioned” on-premises installed software products did not sit very well in this new strategy. For example, from the Commerce set IBM excluded Watson related parts from the trade, even though the core platform was sold (WebSphere Commerce).

The conclusion of North Patrol about the transaction: Despite the capabilities of IBM WebSphere Commerce, it is now even more difficult to recommend it as a platform for demanding web stores. Magento and Hybris are thanking – at least in Finland.

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