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International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE:IBM) has been on a mission to make a strong come back after the lower performance that has prevailed for quite some time. However, there has been some criticism as to whether it’s come back strategy will work.

The questions as to whether the firm is on the road to recovery were especially evident in Big Blue’s InterConnect conference this year when IBM faced a negative analysis report. Toni Sacconaghi, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein, expressed his distrust in IBM’s highly announced transformation in a research note. So far the transformation has been working well enough to revive the company’s legacy businesses from their decline. However, the transformation strategy relies a lot on cloud, security, mobility and analytics businesses.

Sacconaghi’s concern is that IBM’s growth has not yet improved despite the expectations that it will improve over time as the strategic incentives grow bigger. The strategic incentives have gained by $13.8 billion in the last four years, and this includes acquisitions. The company’s revenue from the core businesses has dropped by $29.7 billion and as a result, the firm’s revenue has been dropping every year for the past four years.

IBM is also venturing deeply into emerging market such as its recent bet in the healthcare data analytics through the $2.6 billion acquisition of Truven Healthcare. Though it is a huge move for the company, analysts are still skeptic as to whether the massive investments of the company will bring forth the expected rewards. Some of the analysts believe that IBM is also purchasing customers for Watson in addition to technology and data, rather than selling to already existing customers.

IBM is yet to make a comment about Sacconaghi’s statements. According to the firm’s CFO, Martin Schroeter, revenues from analytics, security, mobile, social and cloud businesses added up to a total of $29 billion. Schroeter stated that the total revenues from these businesses is more than a third of IBM’s business and that it represents a 22% rise from two years ago.

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Steve Kanaval: Portfolio Manager/Writer/ Market Analyst Steve began his career in the Trading Pits in Chicago making markets at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (NYSE:CME) the Chicago Board of Trade and the CBOE in the early 80’s. He ran the Morgan Stanley Derivative Prop Trading for the firm specializing in Index Arbitrage. He continued his career as a Trader/Portfolio Manager for multiple Hedge Funds during the Internet Boom of the 90’s managing large portfolios. Steve is known as an expert in MicroCap Technology Stocks and the emerging Digital Currency markets as a Portfolio Manager for his Family Office. Steve has managed portfolio’s in volatile asset classes for 3 decades as a commodity trader, hedge fund manager and digital currency trader and miner. Steve publishes his views on the asset classes in a public forum and has published more than 10,000 articles simplifying these complex and volatile assets for readers. His work is published on multiple sites including Bloomberg, Equities.com, Hacked.com, CryptoCurrencyNews as a paid contributor. His work includes research, journalism and archived video on important market volatility related to stocks, digital currency and other volatile misunderstood asset classes. He offers a humorous, unique insight and the related back stories and drivers for readers interested in volatility and emerging market assets. Full disclosure Steve is long 25 digital currencies and sits on the board of multiple public companies involved in digital currencies, and owns shares in these companies from time to time.