Following a rather flat looking set of financial numbers released this week, IBM could certainly do with a boost. Which is exactly why the company will welcome the results of a new survey out of 451 Research LLC., this week that reveals that Big Blue is the choice cloud services provider for enterprise users.

451 Research’s “Hosting and Cloud Survey 2015” survey, commissioned by Microsoft, quizzed more than 2,000 enterprise cloud users, and found that IBM ranked as their most preferred cloud company. Microsoft followed in second place, and somewhat surprisingly, cloud market leader Amazon Web Services (AWS) came in third.

IBM was voted top choice by 18 percent of all respondents. In comparison, 11 per cent said they would choose Microsoft’s Azure, while AWS was the top choice for just six per cent of enterprises.

A spokesperson for IBM told Talkin’ Cloud the cloud market was splitting into two distinct segments – one of “low-end commoditized cloud offerings”, and the other being “higher-value, higher-profit cloud opportunities”, which is where IBM is focusing its efforts.

“This is not dissimilar to most IT markets as they mature,” said the spokesperson. “And, as with every other element of its business, IBM is targeting the latter.”

IBM might be the preferred cloud option for enterprises, but questions remain over whether or not the company can translate that popularity to into growth and keep its biggest shareholders happy. This week, Big Blue announced disappointing first quarter earnings that saw sales plummeted 12 percent year-over-year to $12.2 billion over the course of the three months ending March 31. That amounts to a 50 percent increase in the rate of revenue loss compared to the previous quarter.

The only bright spot in its earnings report was its cloud services. Reported as “as a service revenue”, its cloud earnings jumped by 60 percent to a $3.8 billion annual run rate, which compares nicely to a reported $6.26 billion annual run rate for AWS.

IBM isn’t totally reliant on the cloud to fuel future growth though. There’s also the company’s business intelligence division, which produced a healthy 12 percent revenue increase in the first quarter. Elsewhere, the company recently said it will pump $3 billion into a new Internet of Things business unit, where it plans to establish a new cloud-based platform to help customers and partners build IoT related-solutions.

IBM might be down in the doldrums right now, but that doesn’t mean it’s down and out. As Microsoft knows only too well, it’s extremely difficult for a company of IBM’s size to change as fast as the industry, but it is changing, and it’s keeping its customers happy while doing so.

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