Big Blue has seen revenue in its System and Technology Group drop throughout the year, with the division finishing out fiscal 2013 down 18.7 per cent from the previous 12 months. Software and middleware revenues and sales in the Global Business Services unit rose during the year, but Global Technology Services and Global Financing also dropped or stayed flat. Meanwhile, things are looking not so bad for IBM’s converged infrastructure product line, as TPM writes:

When I spent time with other entrepreneurs, the feeling was ‘go public’. Now you have ‘stay private longer’, because then you can invest, innovate. The minute you go public, you have this incredible pressure to increase earnings every single quarter, quarter after quarter. I am not saying that is all bad. There are companies that are perfectly good for it, but it has a real downside as well. Privately innovating instead of publicly growing

The company plans to open 15 new data centers this year, more than doubling the cloud capacity it acquired when it purchased SoftLayer last year for $2 billion. It plans to combine the new data centers, the existing SoftLayer data centers, and the data centers it already ran before the SoftLayer purchase into a single operation that would provide public and private cloud services to its customers, as well as provide services for internal operations.

Nice anecdote about iPads going from zero to full use in mainstream-sounding use cases: I’m not a “tech” guy, but wanted to give you a perspective from a person who works for a fortune 500 company. I recently returned from a National Sales meeting, and was amazed with the iPhone market share within our company 95%+. Not to mention that every sales and marketing employee is given an iPad for “work” use.

Paul Krill asked a few questions about the future of PaaS last month for an omnibus appdev article of his (it’s a nice round up!). Here’s the only slightly edited full reply I sent him: Q: Does 451 Group see 2013 as a banner year for PaaS? If so, why? PaaS has always had the issue of being “big next year.” The nature of PaaS has shifted around so many times that it’s little wonder it’s yet to achieve escape velocity.

You know, $100m actually seems pretty good for something so obscure and weird.  IBM Chief Executive Virginia “Ginni” Rometty has told executives she hopes Watson will generate $10 billion in annual revenue within 10 years, according to an October 2013 conference-call transcript reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. She set that target after the executive in charge of Watson said its business plan would bring in $1 billion of revenue a year by 2018.

GitHub Traffic Analytics service gives developers insight into interest in their projects Paul Krill asked for some quick input on GitHub’s newly released analytics. Here’s what I sent over for his story: As the blog post says, it does look like fun, though pretty minor in the grand scheme of things. GitHub has been a major driver of getting the development community to care more about social interactions and collaborations, here, tracking who’s looking at your code and where they’re coming from - standard web analytics stuff.

The app economy shows that there are big opportunities in “digital pennies” and that the figures are beginning to match even the “analog dollars”. In fact, I suspect eventually digital pennies will dwarf analog dollars. The trouble is that these pennies will not be earned at the same control points. Bits are already big bucks. They’re just not the bits we are used to. “Digital pennies”

The InsightsOne group has offered predictive analytics for consumer companies. It finds patterns from multiple sources of information. For example, Hasan explained how its analytics might help provide patterns in data from a fitness monitor but also health claim information. With that encompassing profile, a company may provide deeper intelligence insights. One use-case area: For example, there is the increasing amounts of data that people and machines create.

Cloud startups like Dropbox pose a problem because they are viral in their sign-up and billing. This is what has given them a foot in the door at SMBs and the departments of big companies, and resulted in CIOs’ business-collaboration platforms becoming based on Dropbox before they know it. Also, some good insights into IBM go-to-market thinking around software. Bottoms up, viral spread still works