IBM spends on research and development, as well as mergers and acquisitions. It makes smart buys and has built a heck of a stack. IBM has acquired some great technologies. It has Bluemix for cloud application development, and Watson for industry-specific Big Data analytics.

During its wrapup segment on day one of IBM Insight 2015, the consensus among Dave Vellante, George Gilbert and Paul Gillin, cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, was that IBM has never won in a volume market. IBM failed in personal computing in the beginning, and it has failed each time it has tried to go into a low-margin, high-volume business. What we are seeing now is IBM going back to what it does best: solving hard problems at high margins for large companies.

With Watson and the stack of mergers and acquisitions, it looks like IBM is working to become the leader in analytics to solve big problems for big companies. Transitioning back to its roots may take some time and cause some market volatility, but IBM is on it’s way back up.

Watch the full video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of IBM Insight 2015. And join in on the conversation by CrowdChatting with theCUBE hosts.

Photo by SiliconANGLE