Post-SEC Clearance, Will IBM Change its Cloud Revenue Reporting?

Now that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has cleared IBM (IBM) of any irregularities or wrongdoing in its cloud revenue reporting practices, will the vendor alter the way it accounts for cloud sales? Or, will no common standard for reporting cloud revenue still evade the industry’s regulatory watchdogs?

IBM said in an 8-K SEC filing it had been informed May 30 that the agency’s enforcement division concluded its investigation into the vendor’s cloud revenue reporting practices with no further action.

The filing read: “On May 30, 2014, the Division of Enforcement of the Securities and Exchange Commission informed IBM that it has concluded its investigation regarding how IBM reports cloud revenue. IBM was notified that based on the information to date, the Division of Enforcement does not intend to recommend any enforcement action by the Commission against IBM.”

In July 2013, IBM disclosed in a quarterly reported filed with the SEC that regulators were looking into its cloud revenue reporting practices. Beyond that, the vendor supplied no details of the probe.

IBM only recently has taken to reporting its cloud service revenue separately from cloud hardware sales. In its recently concluded Q1, the vendor said its cloud revenue delivered as a service doubled to $2.3 billion. The vendor’s stated cloud services revenue target is $7 billion annually by 2015.

It’s possible IBM may have benefitted from the absence of a clear-cut, established way to recognize cloud services revenue, which is multifaceted and can include services, hardware, networking and software.

The vendor has turned in eight consecutive quarters of declining revenue, posting a 4 percent year-over-year slide to $22.5 billion for Q1, with net income tumbling 21 percent to 2.4 billion and EPS falling 15 percent to $2.29 a share.

IBM boss Ginni Rometty earlier this month said the venerable but struggling company is well-positioned to lead an IT industry “reordering” founded on Big Data and analytics, the cloud and what she called “engagement”—or a confluence of social media and mobile. IBM is the best candidate for the job, Rometty said, not only to effect its own transformation to a Big Data, cloud and social/mobile-dominated company but also the industry’s metamorphosis.