The industry marked another milestone from IBM this week, but there’s little reason to celebrate. The enterprise technology giant reported lower revenues once again in a bleak yet unsurprising earnings report for the first quarter that caps off three straight years of decline characterized by a steady erosion of its legacy businesses.

That wear is most pronounced in IBM’s services business, which saw sales plummet 12 percent year-over-year to $12.2 billion over the course of the three months ended March 31, a 50 percent increase in the rate of revenue loss compared to the previous quarter. Much of that is the result of CEO Virgina Rometty’s aggressive efforts to streamline related divisions, particularly the hardware group, but the efficiencies achieved there only make up for a part of the drop.

And that also left IBM with a measly $1.7 billion in infrastructure revenues in the first quarter, less than 40 percent of where that figure stood when its loss streak began twelve quarters ago. One of the few persistent performers remaining on that side of that company is its mainframe business, which saw sales more than double from the first quarter of last year on the back of demand for the latest Systems z 13 model.

IBM credits that growth to the new mobility and analytic capabilities introduced in the mainframe. But that momentum has not carried over to its other legacy software products, which fell eight percent to $5.2 billion – one percent more the drop in the previous quarter – due mainly to weakening demand for middleware.

That downward spiral is only softened by the increasing demand for IBM’s growing roster of cloud services, which jumped over 60 percent to an annual run-rate of $3.8 billion. The equally promising business intelligence division, meanwhile, produced a healthy 12 percent revenue increase in the first quarter.

The two units represent the crux of IBM’s so-called “strategic imperatives”, the main focus of Rometty’s growth efforts thus far, which already account for over a third of its total revenue. But it very much remains to be seen whether the CEO will be able to keep expanding those businesses fast enough to compensate for the rapid declines in the other parts of her company.

That challenge is clearly evident in IBM’s top-line, which fell 12 percent overall and remained effectively flat at $19.59 billion when accounting for outside factors despite the hefty boost in IBM’s cloud and business intelligence businesses. That fell short of analysts’ expectations, yet the company nonetheless manage to beat estimated with its net profit of $2.3 billion in one of the few positive highlights of the earnings report.