Hybrid Cloud: A Driving Force In the Growth of ServiceNow and IBM

The impressive revenue rises of ServiceNow and IBM underpin the growth of hybrid cloud

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Hybrid Cloud: A Driving Force In the Growth of ServiceNow and IBM
Data & AnalyticsNews Analysis

Published: November 2, 2022

Charlie Mitchell

Recent earnings results paint a somewhat bleak picture as CX vendors brace for a downturn.

Lengthening deal cycles and end-users bringing in more decision-makers into prospective deals – as economic uncertainty looms – have certainly thrown the cats amongst the pigeons.

Yet, two vendors coming out relatively unscathed are ServiceNow and IBM.

Indeed, ServiceNow and IBM have posted YoY revenue rises of 21 and 15 percent, respectively.

How have these two companies repelled the revenue slump? Of course, there are likely many factors at play. Nevertheless, both businesses give credit to their hybrid cloud strategies.

The Impact of Hybrid Cloud

Hybrid cloud is fast becoming the dominant architecture for the enterprise, according to a 2022 Harris Poll study.

It finds that 77 percent of businesses have adopted a hybrid cloud for their organizations, with data located across multiple clouds, on-premise, or at the edge.

ServiceNow and IBM are helping organizations build these architectures and reduce complexity.

Indeed, the topic was front and center of their recent earnings calls.

Notably, Bill McDermott, President and CEO of ServiceNow, stated:

Hybrid multi-cloud deployments, adoption of a modern data infrastructure stack, cybersecurity and risk management, AI and data analytics, remote work and collaboration, these trends are not only durable, their relevance is expanding.

“In the U.S. alone, nearly 100 million workers will remain in hybrid environments. 27 billion connected devices will drive more data in cloud over the next three years. And ServiceNow’s platform directly addresses all these challenges.”

IBM is also filling this crucial gap, supporting companies in taking a cautious, incremental approach to cloud innovation. Such an approach is allowing it to negate the CX downturn.

“We continue to see solid demand for our hybrid cloud,” added Arvind Krishna, Chairman and CEO at IBM.

By deploying powerful hybrid cloud and AI technologies, IBM is helping businesses seize new opportunities, overcome today’s challenges, and emerge stronger.

Indeed, this strategy is working for IBM, securing over 200 new hybrid cloud clients in the last quarter alone.

Why Is Hybrid Cloud Hot Right Now?

Public cloud offers excellent accessibility, with businesses billed only for what they use.

Yet, for large enterprises, moving particular workloads may stretch their network connection and is often not viable. Moreover, it can cause real headaches from a security standpoint.

Enter the hybrid cloud, which helps to sidestep these issues by splitting workloads between private and public environments.

In doing so, it offers interoperability, scalability, and security benefits.

Harnessing such benefits, hybrid cloud businesses can accelerate customer experience transformation with the flexibility to deploy any workload, anywhere.

Moreover, hybrid cloud allows brands to decentralize data, which is becoming an increasingly critical topic as compliance regulations become stricter.

Finally – and perhaps this differentiates ServiceNow and IBM most – they offer a broad partner base filled with names from across the CX stack.

With experience in combining these offerings, they understand that clients will want to host workloads across various environments and give them choice over what goes where.

As such, their customers gain peace of mind over security, work from a single point of control, and can enable a steadier approach to the cloud that supplements agile transformation.

Such a steady approach is ideal for complex architectures in industries such as banking.

Indeed, 79 percent of financial institutions are still in the initial stages of shifting to a hybrid cloud environment. Learn more about their progress here.

 

 

Digital Transformation

Brands mentioned in this article.

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