The aggressive target, set by IBM executives at the company’s annual investor meeting in New York on Thursday, is the latest step for the technology giant towards emerging, high-margin businesses, and away from its previous strongholds in hardware and servers.
The $40 billion will come from areas which IBM calls its “strategic imperatives,” namely cloud, analytics, mobile, social and security software.
That would represent about 44 percent of $90 billion in total revenue that analysts expect from IBM in 2018.
Those businesses generated $25 billion in revenue for IBM last year, or 27 percent of its total $93 billion in sales.