International Business Machines

International Business Machines announced a new collaboration with Zscaler and Red Hat to tighten application security for enterprise clients. The joint effort combines IBM and Red Hat software platforms with Zscaler threat intelligence to provide real-time protections at the application layer. The partners plan to coordinate vulnerability discovery, automated policy updates, and validated software remediation workflows for shared customers. International Business Machines is a US-based IT group with a reported market value of about $214.0 billion, and its integrated solutions and services span the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Africa and the Asia Pacific. One figure to watch is how much of IBM's reported US$24.6b of annual recurring revenue comes from security and hybrid cloud offerings connected to Red Hat and Zscaler style deployments.

IBM's consulting segment posted $647 million in second-quarter profit, up 15.1% from $562 million a year earlier, even as revenue edged up just 0.2% to $5.327 billion, according to results and a quarterly filing dated July 22. IBM attributed the improvement primarily to productivity actions, partly offset by investment in innovation, and consulting gross margin also improved to 28.9% from 27.5%. Consulting signings rose 5% as reported, with a trailing book-to-bill ratio of 1.05, though signings are management estimates rather than a standardized revenue measure. At the reported revenue base, one percentage point of consulting margin equals $53.3 million of quarterly segment profit, so a one-point retreat would absorb more than three-fifths of the quarter's $85 million year-over-year profit gain. Repeating 15% profit growth with a flat margin would require roughly 15% revenue growth, or, with flat revenue, a segment margin rise from about 12.1% to 14.0%.

International Business Machines Corporation has launched IBM Ready for SAP SE Solutions, a program aimed at helping midsize and fast-growing businesses modernize their enterprise resource planning systems. Under the program, IBM will combine its industry expertise, fit-to-standard implementation approach and IBM Consulting Advantage, its artificial intelligence-powered consulting delivery platform, to accelerate the adoption of SAP Cloud ERP. IBM helped Volumetric Building Companies reduce operational cycle times by 50% across purchasing, manufacturing and inventory processes after a three-month SAP Cloud ERP transformation, and also supported Second Nature Brands in integrating its acquired Voortman Bakery business into a common enterprise platform. According to research from the IBM Institute for Business Value, 68% of enterprises consider accelerating ERP modernization important for improving operational efficiency and maintaining competitiveness. IBM faces competition from Microsoft Corporation and Amazon.com, Inc., with Microsoft expanding its Dynamics 365 ERP software with AI tools and Amazon Web Services helping businesses integrate AI tools with SAP ERP systems.

Zscaler reaffirmed its fiscal 2027 outlook, guiding first-quarter revenue to about US$935 million to US$939 million and full-year revenue to roughly US$3.91 billion to US$3.94 billion, while outlining a long-term ambition for much higher annual recurring revenue. The company also announced a collaboration with IBM and Red Hat aimed at protecting private applications during the gap between vulnerability disclosure and patching. The reaffirmed guidance supports Zscaler's near-term execution story, though slower expected revenue growth remains a key risk if competition tightens or deal cycles lengthen. Zscaler's narrative projects US$5.3 billion in revenue and US$178.4 million in earnings by 2029, requiring 16.6% yearly revenue growth and a US$241.6 million earnings increase from negative US$63.2 million today. More cautious analysts assume revenue of about US$5.2 billion and earnings near US$16 million by 2029, a more restrained view of how quickly Zscaler's newer security pillars could scale.

DARPA has selected IBM and IonQ to lead the next phase of its Quantum Benchmarking Initiative, aimed at developing a fault-tolerant quantum computer. The two companies advanced to Stage C of the program, which moves beyond conceptual plans to hardware tests conducted by DARPA's independent verification and validation team. DARPA launched the Quantum Benchmarking Initiative in 2024 to determine whether an industrially useful fault-tolerant quantum computer can be built by 2033, and IBM and IonQ both took part in the first two stages. IBM is developing its Quantum Starling fault-tolerant computer and expects to deliver the first fault-tolerant system in 2029, according to Jay Gambetta, Director of IBM Research, while IonQ is pursuing continued improvement and deployment of its Superion systems. The Stage C agreement has a potential value of $300M to continue validating IonQ's approach to delivering large-scale fault-tolerant quantum computers, though funding beyond the initial obligation remains subject to future appropriations and DARPA funding actions.

International Business Machines Corporation introduced a self-hosted deployment option for IBM Bob, its agentic software development platform, letting enterprises adopt AI-powered software development and modernization tools while retaining greater control over sensitive data, source code and development environments. The offering can be deployed across on-premises, private-cloud, sovereign-cloud and air-gapped infrastructure, making it particularly relevant for organizations with stringent security, regulatory and data-residency requirements. IBM is seeking to address growing enterprise demand for secure and governed AI adoption by enabling customers to run supported AI models within controlled environments or connect to external models through hybrid configurations. The enhancement complements IBM's broader hybrid cloud and AI strategy, alongside its watsonx platform and the HashiCorp buyout that augmented its hybrid multi-cloud capabilities. IBM has plummeted 23.6% over the past year against the industry's growth of 155.8%, while earnings estimates for 2026 have moved up 2.5% to $12.33 and for 2027 have increased 3% to $13.19. The company faces stiff competition from Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, and a potent threat from Anthropic, whose Claude Code tool can modernize legacy COBOL systems embedded in IBM's mainframe ecosystem.

Zscaler announced a new partnership with IBM and Red Hat to help secure private applications during active vulnerability windows. The collaboration combines Zscaler's Autonomous Application Shield with IBM and Red Hat remediation tools to deliver application-specific protections, while Lightwell supplies validated open source fixes. The joint solution targets real-time safeguards against exploitation attempts, including those using AI-powered and opportunistic attack methods. Zscaler, a US software provider with a market cap of $32.9b, runs a cloud-based security platform that inspects traffic and enforces access rules for enterprises worldwide. The company said the key markers ahead are early access adoption of Autonomous Application Shield with Lightwell by large enterprises and any contribution to annual recurring revenue tied to application shielding and AI-driven response.

IBM and Red Hat announced that their Lightwell initiative has identified and remediated more than 400 previously unknown vulnerabilities in widely used Java libraries, and that Lightwell Clearinghouse is now generally available. The Clearinghouse gives enterprise customers a direct path to submit specific open source software dependencies for priority review and remediation. Through Lightwell, the two companies uncovered, remediated and backported fixes for the more than 400 previously unknown bugs in widely deployed, production-grade software, delivering version-specific patches through secured repositories that connect with customers' existing IT processes without replacing their current security scanners, software repositories, development pipelines or testing processes. Applicable fixes are contributed back to upstream open source projects under responsible disclosure protocols, with embargo protections maintained for Clearinghouse participants. Gunnar Hellekson, vice president and general manager of Lightwell at Red Hat, said AI agents have shifted the threat landscape by exploiting old dependencies at machine speed, and that finding and neutralizing 400-plus novel vulnerabilities so quickly shows how fast Lightwell can move.

Zapata Quantum has joined the IBM Quantum Network, the company announced, with plans to use IBM's quantum computers alongside its own use-case discovery and application development expertise. The Boston-based company, which trades over the counter under the ticker ZPTA, said the effort aims to close the quantum application gap by translating advances in quantum computing into mission-critical applications. Chief Executive Sumit Kapur said IBM's rapid progress toward fault-tolerant quantum computing brings that application gap into sharper focus, while Vice President of Strategy and Co-Founder Jonny Olson said superconducting qubits remain one of the most capable paths to advantage because their hardware is fast. The move builds on prior joint research between the two companies, including a landmark study published in Nature Biotechnology that produced experimentally validated candidates targeting KRAS and was named one of the journal's Top 10 Articles of 2025, as well as co-authored work in npj Quantum Information on variational quantum factoring. Zapata said insights from the network will inform Quantum Pilot, its hardware-agnostic platform that helps enterprises identify, prioritize and develop quantum applications as hardware matures.

IBM expanded its AI and digital infrastructure push on 1 October 2026 by adding private equity executive Frank Baker to its board and rolling out self-hosted deployment for its IBM Bob agentic software development platform across on-premises, private, sovereign, and air-gapped environments. The move lets enterprises run IBM Bob and Digital Asset Haven entirely within their own infrastructure, sharpening IBM's appeal to highly regulated clients that need tight control over data residency, security policies, and digital asset operations. The on-premises beta for IBM Digital Asset Haven on IBM Z and LinuxONE keeps sensitive digital asset workflows, keys and compliance controls inside client data centers while still using the same APIs as its SaaS offering. IBM's narrative projects $78.2 billion in revenue and $11.9 billion in earnings by 2029, requiring 4.2% yearly revenue growth and about a $1.2 billion earnings increase from $10.7 billion today, with a $240.59 fair value implying 7% upside. The company still faces the near-term catalyst of monetizing its US$24.6 billion of ARR and the key risk from an ongoing securities law investigation.

Shares of IT consulting and business-services firms rallied after Accenture reported stronger-than-expected results and an above-consensus fiscal 2027 outlook. Accenture guided fiscal 2027 revenue growth of 3%–6% following a Q4 revenue beat of roughly $18.7B, easing fears that AI would hollow out traditional consulting and outsourcing demand. The read-across lifted EPAM 6.8%, DXC 5.7%, Everforth 11.7%, EXL 6.2%, and Grid Dynamics 8%, with Cognizant, IBM, Salesforce, and Indian IT ADRs Infosys and Wipro also gaining. Separately, IBM announced a self-hosted deployment option for IBM Bob aimed at enterprise AI sovereignty and governance, letting enterprises run AI-driven software delivery and modernization inside customer-controlled environments including on-premises, sovereign clouds, private clouds, and air-gapped setups. IBM also expanded its IBM Bob Premium Package for Z with that self-hosted capability and deeper application intelligence tools, targeting mainframe modernization under strict compliance and data-sovereignty standards.

IBM announced a self-hosted deployment option for IBM Bob, its agentic software development platform, sending shares up 5.7% in the morning session. The self-hosted deployment lets enterprises run AI-driven software delivery and modernization inside customer-controlled environments, including on-premises systems, sovereign clouds, private clouds, and air-gapped environments, as IBM aims to advance enterprise artificial intelligence sovereignty and governance. IBM also expanded its IBM Bob Premium Package for Z to incorporate the self-hosted capability along with deeper application intelligence tools, enhancements the company says are designed to modernize mission-critical mainframe workloads while meeting strict compliance and data sovereignty standards. After the initial pop, the shares cooled to $228.88, up 4.1% from the previous close. IBM is down 21.5% since the beginning of the year and trades 30.5% below its 52-week high of $329.23 from June 2026.

IBM outlined how its products will work with Nvidia's new AI-agent safety platform, sending the hybrid-cloud and enterprise-software company's shares up about 0.4% to $221.49 around 10:18 a.m. ET Tuesday. Under the plan, IBM's Agent Identity and HashiCorp Vault connect to Nvidia OpenShell to manage credentials and permissions, while Identity Protection tracks agents across an organization. IBM Fusion adds BlueField-4 hardware and Red Hat OpenShift provides a place to run agents across hybrid-cloud systems, and Nvidia's platform also includes Sentry, which monitors agent behavior and can quarantine an agent that crosses its limits. IBM disclosed no contract value or revenue target for the collaboration, leaving investors to weigh whether customers will pay for the combination at scale. The article first appeared on GuruFocus.

International Business Machines introduced an on-premises version of its Digital Asset Haven platform for regulated institutions, letting banks and other supervised entities run the platform inside their own data centers using existing controls. The beta deployment runs on IBM Z and LinuxONE, keeping digital asset keys, workflows, and compliance controls within existing environments, and includes an ISO 20022 adapter and Swift ledger connectivity. Separately, IBM and Anderon LLC reported operational production of quantum wafers, a manufacturing milestone for quantum hardware in the US tied to a CHIPS Act backed facility. Investors will watch how many regulated institutions move from pilot to production on the on-premises beta and Swift shared ledger integration through 2027, and whether Anderon's quantum wafers progress from initial runs to volume orders once that facility ramps.

IBM announced on September 24 two new capabilities for its Digital Asset Haven platform, aimed at tier-one financial institutions, governments, and regulated entities. In a new beta rollout, clients can connect to SWIFT's blockchain-based shared ledger, linking into a cooperative network of over 12,500 financial institutions across 150+ countries, and can process 24/7 tokenized deposit transactions through the ISO 20022 Messaging Adapter using familiar messaging workflows. IBM also introduced an on-premises beta deployment option for Digital Asset Haven on IBM Z and LinuxONE servers, letting institutions orchestrate assets such as stablecoins and tokenized deposits entirely within their private data centers. The company's software base generated $7.8 billion in revenue in Q2 2026, up 5%, with Red Hat up 11% and Data up 19%, while its distributed infrastructure sub-segment grew 37% in Q2 and built a backlog near $500 million. IBM ended Q2 with $62.0 billion in total debt against $8.2 billion in cash, restricted cash, and marketable securities after spending $10.5 billion on acquisitions year-to-date, and total Infrastructure revenue fell 7% in Q2 to $3.8 billion as IBM Z mainframe revenue dropped 42% in a cyclical trough.

International Business Machines Corporation and Lockheed Martin Corporation have established a quantum innovation hub at ETH Zurich through an offset agreement with armasuisse, Switzerland's Federal Office for Defence Procurement. The initiative will host Switzerland's first IBM Quantum System Two, powered by IBM's advanced Quantum Nighthawk processor, at the Swiss National Supercomputing Center in Lugano. Operating the facility alongside ETH Zurich, the collaboration bridges IBM's expertise in quantum computing and AI with Lockheed Martin's focus on quantum sensing and additive manufacturing. For both tech and defense investors, the hub reinforces a shared commitment to developing next-generation compute capabilities for complex industrial and national security applications. The joint Swiss initiative offers a clear strategic catalyst for both companies, though its near-term financial impact remains conditional.

International Business Machines Corporation has strengthened its decades-long partnership with Marist University through an Innovation Incubator focused on artificial intelligence research, enterprise computing and student career readiness. The program will use the IBM z17 mainframe to support initial projects in AI, business, finance and civic engagement, including autonomous AI agents in controlled marketing campaigns, quantum optimization algorithms for analyzing real-time financial data and improving portfolio allocations, and ways AI can improve polling methods, survey design and models of voter participation. IBM experts will work with Marist students and faculty on research addressing business, societal and community challenges, with applications extending into business, communications, political science and environmental studies. IBM faces competition from Microsoft Corporation, which is advancing AI through its Copilot products and intelligent agents, and from Alphabet Inc., which is expanding AI through new Gemini models used in healthcare, weather forecasting, education and scientific research. IBM shares have lost 13% over the past year against the industry's growth of 212.1%, and the stock trades at a forward price-to-sales ratio of 3.02 versus the industry average of 5.29. Earnings estimates for 2026 have declined 0.1% to $12.33 over the past 60 days, while estimates for 2027 have decreased 0.2% to $13.22, and IBM currently carries a Zacks Rank #4 (Sell).

IBM has placed its z17 mainframe at Marist University's new Innovation Incubator, sending shares up about 2.2% to $236.55 Wednesday morning from Tuesday's $231.38 close. Marist plans to test autonomous marketing agents and explore AI applications in polling, and researchers are also scoping a project that would use quantum optimization to build portfolio allocations. IBM provided the machine for students and faculty to develop and test applications, and its announcement gives no dollar value for the system or revenue forecast for the collaboration. The stock still sat 2.59% below its $242.84 GF Value estimate, a gap that gives investors a valuation reference but that the campus project alone does not close. The investor case here takes patience, since getting future developers comfortable with IBM's technology could pay off if their work reaches enterprise customers, but the z17 at Marist shows where IBM wants its platform used rather than what customers will pay for the applications that emerge.

The Hashgraph Group, or THG, announced that its IDTrust self-sovereign identity platform has been validated and officially listed on the IBM Cloud Catalog, making it among the first commercial Hedera-powered enterprise applications directly purchasable as a SaaS product through a major cloud marketplace. THG also qualified for IBM Silver Partner status and signed a global Embedded Solution Agreement with IBM covering Cloud and AI technology, a licensing and partnership agreement that lets technology partners integrate IBM technology into their own proprietary products to sell a complete, single-branded solution. IDTrust is a decentralized self-sovereign identity platform with enterprise-grade cryptography for AI agents, devices, and humans, already deployed with a leading European telecoms operator to power verified caller identity, and it provides decentralized identifiers and verifiable credentials built on open W3C standards and designed to support the EU eIDAS 2.0 framework. The listing comes as Gartner projects that 40% of enterprise applications will embed task-specific AI agents by the end of 2026, up from less than 5% in 2025, and as Know Your Agent moves from a theoretical concern to an enterprise priority. For Hedera Hashgraph, the listing represents a significant distribution milestone, since IBM has been a member of the Hedera Governing Council since 2019 and enterprise clients can now purchase Hedera-anchored identity infrastructure through existing IBM consumption commitments.

International Business Machines and NASA have released an open Lunar Foundation Model for scientific lunar research to the public, while IBM, Lockheed Martin and ETH Zurich have created a quantum innovation hub to broaden access to quantum computing research and training. The ETH Zurich quantum hub is intended to support industrial use cases in areas such as materials science, financial services and aerospace. International Business Machines is a US IT group with a US$216.3b market cap that sells integrated hardware, software and services, and its work with NASA and the ETH Zurich quantum hub taps into areas where large research and enterprise clients already use its infrastructure and consulting capabilities. The clearest test of the bull case will come as IBM reports how many paying industrial and research workloads actually run on Quantum System Two and related services at ETH Zurich once that system is deployed, and whether management starts breaking out any quantum or lunar AI related revenue or backlog in future quarterly updates. The bear case centers on execution risk in turning complex research collaborations into scalable, high margin Software and Consulting revenue rather than isolated projects.

IBM raised its quarterly dividend by a single penny, from $1.68 to $1.69, in a declaration dated April 22, 2026, marking its 31st consecutive year of increases but adding only about four cents to the annualized payout. The one-cent step continues a run of five straight penny bumps, a sharp slowdown from 2015, when the quarterly payout rose from $1.10 to $1.30. IBM's dividend remains well covered: the company produced $14.73 billion in free cash flow in 2025 against a payout of $6.255 billion, and CFO Jim Kavanaugh told analysts on the Q2 call that IBM returned $3.2 billion to shareholders in dividends through the first half of the year. The cash is increasingly being redirected toward acquisitions of Confluent and HashiCorp, $62 billion in debt, and more than $10 billion committed to quantum computing over five years, while CEO Arvind Krishna pointed to a generative AI book of business exceeding $12.5 billion. IBM offers the highest yield among its peers at 2.83% but the slowest growth, trailing Microsoft, which pushed its quarterly dividend from $0.91 to $0.98 in September on a run from $0.13 in 2010, as well as Cisco Systems and Oracle. With IBM shares down 20.71% year to date at $230.17, the total-return case now rests on the AI reinvestment thesis rather than dividend growth.

International Business Machines said its subsidiary Anderon won a US$1b federal award to build a U.S. quantum chip foundry, alongside a further US$1b IBM commitment to the project. The planned facility is described as the first stand-alone quantum wafer foundry in the U.S., focused on quantum chip manufacturing under CHIPS Act funding. IBM also announced a partnership with regulatory intelligence provider CUBE to integrate real time global AI rule monitoring into watsonx.governance. The Anderon quantum foundry award and CUBE tie up together represent a US$2b quantum and governance push by the company.

Dun & Bradstreet announced that the D&B Commercial Graph is now available in the IBM watsonx Orchestrate Agent Catalog through a Model Context Protocol server. The integration connects AI agents to verified business identity, relationships, and commercial context, anchored by the D-U-N-S Number business identifier, so agents recognize the same business across systems, workflows, and domains. Elizabeth Barrette, General Manager for Master Data Management Solutions at Dun & Bradstreet, said the company's recent AI Momentum survey found just 6% of businesses say their enterprise data is fully ready to support AI at scale. Megan Grant, Managing Director at IBM Technology, U.S. Industry Market, said the arrangement lets organizations bring trusted data and business context into the AI workflows they build and deploy. The D&B Commercial Graph MCP Server is available through the IBM watsonx Orchestrate Agent Catalog, supporting workflows across sales, marketing, procurement, compliance, finance, credit evaluation, and master data management.

Anderon, an IBM subsidiary, finalized a $1 billion research-and-development award from the U.S. Department of Commerce on Wednesday under the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act. The funding will support Anderon's efforts to advance quantum wafer manufacturing at its facility in Albany, New York, where a 300-millimeter quantum wafer foundry serves customers across the quantum industry. IBM has put up $1 billion of its own money alongside the federal award, and production is underway with quantum wafers already in process. The Anderon award is part of a broader $2 billion package distributed across nine quantum computing companies under the CHIPS and Science Act, with GlobalFoundries in line for $375 million and D-Wave Quantum, Rigetti Computing, and Infleqtion each expected to receive $100 million; each of the nine firms will give the federal government a minority ownership stake in exchange for the funding. The finalization follows a letter of intent between IBM and the Commerce Department announced in May, and last week Rigetti Computing, D-Wave Quantum, and Quantinuum each finalized $100 million deals with the department. IBM stock fell 3.3% on Wednesday and has declined nearly 19% this year.

CUBE, the AI-native regulatory intelligence company, announced a collaboration with IBM to add a new Regulatory Horizon Scanning capability within IBM watsonx.governance. The integration embeds CUBE's global regulatory intelligence directly into watsonx.governance, giving enterprises continuous visibility into regulatory developments affecting their AI systems worldwide. The capability continuously monitors AI-related regulatory developments from authoritative sources, automatically capturing updates from regulators, legislative bodies, standards organisations and industry associations, and making them available within existing AI governance workflows. The collaboration follows partnerships CUBE announced earlier this year with Microsoft and ServiceNow, and comes as requirements emerge across jurisdictions ranging from the EU's AI Act to the NIST AI Risk Management Framework. Ben Richmond, Founder and CEO of CUBE, said regulatory intelligence is becoming a foundational layer of how AI itself is governed, while Maryam Ashoori, VP of watsonx.governance Product and Engineering at IBM, said CUBE brings a depth of regulatory expertise and global reach few providers can match.

IBM expanded its relationship with Turkey's Kredi Kayıt Bürosu on Monday, pushing watsonx and IBM infrastructure deeper into a financial platform operating at enormous scale. KKB plans to deploy IBM data, mainframe and watsonx technologies as it modernizes infrastructure capable of handling more than 8.5 billion transactions annually, a workload that works out to roughly 23.3 million transactions every day. The project spans software-development acceleration, system monitoring, database management and API integration, putting IBM technology directly into a mission-critical financial workload. IBM did not disclose the contract value or a deployment timetable, while second-quarter company revenue increased just 1% to $17.2 billion. IBM shares slipped approximately 0.4% to $248.07 Tuesday morning, a price only 2.23% above the $242.67 GF Value estimate.

Four major infrastructure vendors have now shipped standalone agent governance products at general availability, a rush that has itself become the signal that agent governance is decoupling from individual platforms to become a category of its own. Okta pushed furthest into new territory with its July 2026 product innovations, shipping Agent-to-Agent Connections at general availability to enable secure multi-agent workflows through temporary runtime tokens that enforce which agents may invoke which others, alongside the Agent Gateway, available as a research release, which sits between agents and the systems they access without requiring code changes. IBM's Think 2026 announcement positioned next-generation watsonx Orchestrate as an agentic control plane, introduced in June on AWS and IBM Cloud, offering runtime policy management, credential health monitoring, and an Agent Access overview across an organization's entire agent estate. Broadcom embedded governance directly into the compute fabric with AgentMinder, unveiled at VMware Explore on August 31 and shipping at general availability bundled into the VMware Private AI Cloud, treating agents as enterprise-grade identities bound to a declared mission, permitted intents, approved tools, and authorized resources. Dataiku made a different architectural bet, with Dataiku Agent Management scanning agents across nine platforms including Microsoft Copilot Studio, Salesforce Agentforce, AWS Bedrock, and Google Vertex to provide a cross-platform control tower for discovery, certification, and audit-readiness. The urgency tracks to two numbers: Menlo Ventures found that 76 percent of AI applications are purchased rather than built internally, and the Cloud Security Alliance reported in February that 84 percent of organizations doubt they could pass a compliance audit focused on agent behavior or access controls.