Times have changed, and along with the changes that the modern era has brought are ups and downs that sometimes go beyond what most would consider average. Some people, common folk mostly, have mostly experienced the best of what the modern era has to offer. However, the same cannot be said about certain billion or million dollar companies. Change has sometimes brought many companies down especially with the recent slump in the economy. It even brought down once high end companies to its knees, and sometimes, it has escorted most to the trash. This usually happens on to companies who are not able to adapt. Luckily for IBM, they are not yet at the extreme of the spectrum. They are still at a level which most would consider as safe, but they did admit that they fear that their days in the average zone are numbered. One of the main causes of their stagnation in terms of sales, revenue, and stock market value has been cloud computing. It has put their software products at risk because slowly but surely, some products offered by the former does what theirs do, but in a more convenient way. In addition, it is cheaper which definitely counts as a plus to most consumers. The challenge for IBM now is to set the company to take the step forward. This has been a challenge that riddled the minds of its former executives, and now it has been passed down to its current executive, Virginia Rometty. Rometty has addressed the media and claimed that they are currently in the works of taking the mantle and setting IBM up for the next generation. One of its first steps was the purchase of a rapid growing cloud computing company, SoftLayer Technologies. IBM bought the company for $2 billion. Currently, they cultivated this step and allocated a budget of $1.2 billion which is to be invested in cloud data centers and another billion to develop software tools that will allow users to develop their cloud. They are also hoping that the latter will attract more programmers into the company. Looking back however, IBM did something similar in the past by offering SmartCloud. However, it was a bust because it was molded to be an extension of their software rather than an entirely new branch. This was an issue that IBM promises to never happen again in their new set-up. They vowed that this is an entirely new direction that they are looking to build upon. This BlueMix initiative, as IBM would like to call it, has resulted in a growth of $4.4 billion in sales the other year, and mostly are coming from private cloud centers. These are mostly entrepreneurs or business companies which are looking to create a private server among its pool of employees. As of the moment, IBM is currently keeping strong and believes that cloud computing is the direction that they need to take to accomplish their vision of setting the company up for the next generation. For more information please visit this Article on Cloud Computing