Are Brighter Days Ahead for IBM?

Shares of IBM (NYSE: IBM) recently rallied after its fourth-quarter numbers beat analysts' expectations. Its revenue rose 0.1% annually to $21.78 billion (up 3% after excluding currency impacts and divested businesses), clearing estimates by $160 million and ending five straight quarters of declines.

Its non-GAAP earnings declined 3% to $4.71 per share, but still topped estimates by three cents. Its GAAP earnings, which faced an easy comparison due to tax-related charges a year earlier, surged 91% to $4.11 per share.

CEO Ginni Rometty, who has led IBM since 2012, also announced that she would resign on April 6 and hand the reins over to Arvind Krishna, the chief of IBM's Cloud and Cognitive Software division. Krishna's promotion and IBM's takeover of Red Hat, which closed last July, suggest that the tech giant plans to aggressively chase Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) and Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) in the high-growth cloud market.

Source Fool.com