International Business Machines Corp. IBM is scheduled to report its quarterly earnings following the closing bell on Monday. Morningstar's Director of Technology, Media and Telecom Peter Wahlstrom was on CNBC Monday to discuss what kind of number investors should expect from the Big Blue and the risk that the company faces.
Looking Past Revenue
"The short version is that everyone is going to be looking past revenue, because the company has at least a 7 percent FX headwind," Wahlstrom said.
"And when you dive into a couple of the different segments for IBM, each one of them is going to feel pressure, whether it's on the services side, the software side or the hardware side."
Internet of Things
Wahlstrom was asked if IBM's $3 billion investment in the Internet of Things forms a case of "too little, too late."
He replied, "No. I think the Internet of Things evolution is still quite early, and IBM in, actually, coalescing its strategy in creating a business unit should allow it to leverage both its services, its software and its hardware divisions."
He continued, "So, IBM is going about this in the right way, and when it's targeting the larger enterprise global customers, it should have a pretty decent value proposition in our view.
"However, it is going to take some time for some of the IoT initiatives to really make it into the numbers in our view."
Risk: Cloud Adoption
According to Wahlstrom, "As the cloud continues to gain adoption and traction in the marketplace, there's the risk that the level of complexity actually reduces and there's no need or less need for IBM's services, hardware and software."
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