[cptskippy]

This isn't outsourcing, it is advertising. Apple and IBM have complimentary services that they've just made easier to integrate.

There is a vacuum in the Enterprise from when Blackberry was the go-to device. This smells of an in-road Apple might be taking to make itself the defacto Mobile Device for Enterprise.

IBM benefits from this by being able to market Watson services easier to App makers.

[sumoboy]

Also how this really a cross-platform path factoring in Android? Has IBM been relevant with anything in the past 10 years regarding technology?

[cptskippy]

> Has IBM been relevant with anything in the past 10 years regarding technology?

You use things developed by IBM daily without even knowing it. Barcodes, credit cards, RAM, hard drives, modern microprocessors, airline travel, laser eye surgery, and even relational databases are all possible thanks to advances by IBM. Almost all nanotechnology research utilizes scanning tunneling microscopy which was invented IBM.

IBM Research is usually bleeding edge technology. They work on technology decades before it becomes mainstream. Currently they're doing research in things like High temperature superconductivity, Quantum Computing, and Nanotechnology.

IBM also develops solutions for the financial services industry and are working on Blockchain technologies for the banking system. They're doing advanced AI research. They have healthcare and geo-spatial initiatives as well.

[pjmlp]

They have one of the best JVMs.

Are the ones porting Go to their UNIX and mainframe variants.

Used to be the biggest contributor to Swift on Linux (not sure about nowadays).

Seat on the ANSI C++ table.

I imagine many Linux kernel goodies are still coming from them.

They are still one of the companies with biggest amount of patents per year.

[coldtea]

>Has IBM been relevant with anything in the past 10 years regarding technology?

For your line of work, perhaps not. For the enterprise and government customers, where they make billions, very much so.