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International Business Machines Corporation IBM recently announced that Deutsche Telekom AG DTEGY will deploy the IBM Concert solution to improve overall efficiency. This AI-powered automation solution will provide Deutsche Telekom with intelligent resilience for complex IT operations such as patch management and the orchestration of security-related activities. This, in turn, will help Deutsche Telekom to better address the complexity of critical vulnerabilities across its hybrid cloud platform and respond faster to potential threats.
IBM Concert brings together all relevant data and specializations for AI-driven recommendations and workflows. It helps reduce operational costs for patching vulnerabilities through fast response times and higher efficiency for securing all systems, freeing up IT resources and manpower, which then can be used for other productive purposes. Using the IBM Watsonx platform, the fully automated patching process for operating systems has been designed to reduce patching time from 90 minutes to a maximum of 20 minutes. Leveraging Generative AI, IBM Concert develops an optimized and prioritized patching plan by creating contextual information about system topology and business requirements that enables end-to-end AI-powered automation.
IBM’s Watsonx platform is likely to be the core technology platform for IBM’s AI capabilities. Watsonx delivers the value of foundational models to the enterprise, enabling them to be more productive. This enterprise-ready AI and data platform comprises three products to help organizations accelerate and scale AI — the watsonx.ai studio for new foundation models, generative AI and machine learning, the watsonx.data fit-for-purpose data store built on an open lake house architecture and the watsonx.governance toolkit to help enable AI workflows to be built with responsibility and transparency.
With a surge in traditional cloud-native workloads and associated applications, along with a rise in generative AI deployment, there is a radical expansion in the number of cloud workloads that enterprises are currently managing. This has resulted in heterogeneous, dynamic and complex infrastructure strategies, which, in turn, have led firms to undertake a cloud-agnostic and interoperable approach to highly secure multi-cloud management.
IBM is poised to benefit from healthy demand trends for hybrid cloud and AI, which drive the Software and Consulting segments. The company’s growth is expected to be aided by analytics, cloud computing and security in the long term. A combination of a better business mix, improving operating leverage through productivity gains and increased investment in growth opportunities will likely boost profitability.
Buoyed by strong demand for hybrid cloud and AI, IBM has surged 63.7% over the past year compared with the industry’s growth of 9.4%, outperforming peers like Microsoft Corporation MSFT and Amazon.com, Inc. AMZN. While Microsoft has gained 6.6%, Amazon jumped 11.3% over this period.
One-Year IBM Stock Price Performance
IBM is currently witnessing an uptrend in estimate revisions. Earnings estimates for 2025 have moved up 4.6% to $10.95 over the past year, while the same for 2026 has increased 4.5% to $11.66. The positive estimate revision portrays bullish sentiments about the stock’s growth potential.
Despite solid hybrid cloud and AI traction, IBM is facing stiff competition from Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. Increasing pricing pressure is eroding margins, and profitability has trended down over the years, barring occasional spikes. The company’s ongoing, heavily time-consuming business model transition to the cloud is challenging. Weakness in its traditional business and foreign exchange volatility remain significant concerns.
From a valuation standpoint, IBM appears to be trading at a premium relative to the industry and is trading well above its mean. Going by the price/book ratio, the company shares currently trade at 9.92, higher than 3.95 for the industry and the stock’s mean of 6.01.
IBM hybrid cloud blends public cloud, private cloud and on-premises infrastructure to develop a single, flexible, cost-optimal IT infrastructure. With the buyout of HashiCorp, the company has created a comprehensive end-to-end hybrid cloud platform built for AI-driven complexity, delivering clients extensive application, infrastructure and security lifecycle management capabilities. The IBM Concert solution is increasingly gaining wider adoption by incorporating modern AI and automation technologies for a future-proof, scalable and highly secure IT operating model.
However, with a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold), IBM appears to be treading in the middle of the road, and new investors could be better off if they trade with caution. It is also trading at premium valuation metrics and investors could wait for a better entry point to cash in on its long-term fundamentals. Consequently, it might not be prudent to bet on the stock at the moment. You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.
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This article originally published on Zacks Investment Research (zacks.com).
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