IBM has shed three of its top executives in the last month, including its cloud chief technology officer Danny Sabbah, who had spent the last 27 years at Big Blue.

Fortune reports that Sabbah left IBM in late December. He first joined the company back in 1988, and held various roles over the years including heading up its Tivoli systems management software and its next-gen computing efforts.

Also heading off for pastures new is Brendan Hannigan, general manager of IBM’s security group. He apparently retired in December after spending four years with the firm, having joined when it acquired Q1 Labs Inc. in 2011.

Last but not least, December also saw the departure of 43-year old IBM veteran Steve Mills, executive vice president of software and systems. Mills, who was responsible for directing approximately 110,000 employees, spanning development, manufacturing, sales, marketing and support, left Big Blue on New Year’s Eve. Mills made several appearances on SiliconANGLE’s TV show theCUBE, with his most recent coming at the IBM Pulse conference in February, 2014.

Big companies lose executives all the time, but in the case of a company like IBM the departure of three senior execs in quick succession leads to all kinds of rumors and theories. Rob Enderle, principal analyst at Enderle Group, provided one of the most interesting theories, saying that the timing of the execs’ departures may be a sign they could be working together on an outside project.

“One of the reasons that folks depart together like this is because they have an idea they want to explore outside of the firm,” Enderle told Computerworld. “Every one of these folks would be a huge asset to a smaller firm, and they’d certainly have the combined financial resources to start something interesting. The fact they left together suggests they have something else they want to do together, and given their powerful skillset, that ‘something’ could be really interesting.”

The news comes as IBM was the subject of a scathing report from 24/7 Wall Street, which said some parts of its business are going to do a lot more for revenue growth than others:

“Cloud revenue was up more than 65% in 2015 at that time to $9.4 billion over trailing 12 months, and business analytics revenue was up 19%, if you adjust for currencies (or 9% as reported). Watson continues to grow as well, but the real growth for that will be in the years ahead. Watson may be the software product of the future. However, so far, it is barely more than a demonstration tool for an IBM initiative that has not improved the company’s fortunes enough for investors to believe IBM has much of a future,” the report said.

IBM’s shares have fallen by almost six percent in the last month, and are down 17 percent from one year ago.

Image credit: IBM Pulse via YouTube