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Sentiment · FY2026 Q2
| Analyst | Firm | Questions (Challenge)Percentage of questions scored as challenging — where the analyst pushed back, pressed for specifics, or questioned management's assumptions. |
|---|---|---|
| Ben Reitzes | Melius Research | 7 (29%) |
| Amit Daryanani | Evercore ISI | 7 (14%) |
| Wamsi Mohan | Bank of America | 7 (14%) |
| Erik Woodring | Morgan Stanley | 7 (29%) |
| Jim Schneider | Goldman Sachs | 7 (14%) |
| Matt Swanson | RBC Capital Markets | 5 (0%) |
| Brent Thill | Jefferies | 3 (0%) |
| Brian Essex | JPMorgan | 3 (0%) |
| Fatima Boolani | Citigroup | 2 (0%) |
| Firm | Analysts | Questions (Challenge)Percentage of questions scored as challenging — where the analyst pushed back, pressed for specifics, or questioned management's assumptions. |
|---|---|---|
| Melius Research | 1 | 7 (29%) |
| Bank of America | 1 | 7 (14%) |
| Evercore ISI | 1 | 7 (14%) |
| Goldman Sachs | 1 |
| 7 (14%) |
| Morgan Stanley | 1 | 7 (29%) |
| RBC Capital Markets | 1 | 5 (0%) |
| Jefferies | 2 | 4 (0%) |
| JPMorgan | 1 | 3 (0%) |
IBM delivered Q1 revenue growth of 6% with 19% diluted operating EPS growth as the software portfolio accelerated with broad-based strength and Data and Red Hat both grew double digits. The z17 mainframe continued delivering record infrastructure results, and the Confluent acquisition strengthened the data and AI strategy. Management maintained full-year guidance at 5%+ revenue growth and approximately $1 billion in free cash flow growth, with a productivity flywheel driving ongoing margin expansion.
Revenue Growth | Cloud & AI | Demand | Capital Allocation | Macroeconomic | Guidance Reliability | M&A | Competitive Dynamics | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024Q4 | 3 | 1 | 2 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 2 | |
| 2025Q1 | 2 | 1 | 3 | 1 | 2 | 1 | 1 | |
| 2025Q2 | 3 | 4 | 3 | 1 | 1 | |||
| 2025Q3 | 3 | 4 | 2 | 2 | 1 | 1 | ||
| 2025Q4 | 3 | 2 | 2 | 1 | 1 | |||
| 2026Q1 | 3 | 5 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 2 |
| '24Q4 | '25Q1 | '25Q2 | '25Q3 | '25Q4 | '26Q1 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Revenue Growth | 3 | 2 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 3 |
| Cloud & AI | 1 | 1 | 4 | 4 | 2 | 5 |
| Demand | 2 | 3 | 3 | 2 | 2 | |
| Capital Allocation | 2 | 1 | 2 | 1 | 1 | |
| Macroeconomic | 1 | 2 | 1 | 1 | ||
| Guidance Reliability | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | |
| M&A | 2 | 1 | 1 | |||
| Competitive Dynamics | 1 | 1 | 2 |
| Quarter | Revenue | Rev YoY | EPS | EPS YoY | Gross margin | Op margin | Net margin | FCF |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| FY2024 Q4 | $17.55B | +1.0% | $3.09 | -13.0% | 59.5% | 22.2% | 16.6% | $3.89B |
| FY2025 Q1 | $14.54B | +0.6% | $1.12 | -34.9% | 55.2% | 12.1% | 7.3% | $3.98B |
| FY2025 Q2 | $16.98B | +7.7% | $2.31 | +17.9% | 58.8% | 18.2% | 12.9% | $1.49B |
| FY2025 Q3 | $16.33B | +9.1% | $1.84 | +611.1% | 58.7% | 16.3% | 10.7% | $3.69B |
| FY2025 Q4 | $19.69B | +12.2% | $5.88 | +90.3% | 61.6% | 21.2% | 28.4% | $3.13B |
| FY2026 Q1 | $15.92B | +9.5% | $1.28 | +14.3% | 56.2% | 13.9% | 7.6% | $4.78B |
| FY2026 Q2 | $17.16B | +1.1% | $2.27 | -1.7% | 57.7% | 6.8% | 12.6% | $2.60B |
Management’s own words, often on a non-GAAP, constant-currency, or adjusted basis — so these can differ from the GAAP figures above (e.g. constant-currency revenue growth excludes currency swings).
What IBM and other companies said about each other on FY2026 Q1 earnings calls — extracted verbatim from public transcripts. Mentions from the newest quarter are a Pro feature.
“IBM recently changed their architecture from fixed coupler to tunable coupler technology, so very similar to what we are doing right now.”
IBM moved to tunable-coupler architecture, converging with Rigetti's approach, a competitive read-through on IBM's superconducting roadmap.
“In the first quarter, these include IBM, GSK, John Deere, Little Caesars, Acadia Pharmaceuticals and Baileys.”
IBM is cited as a first-quarter new-business win for Omnicom, implying IBM shifted marketing/agency spend to Omnicom.
“clients such as NatWest and RBC are modernizing their mainframe environments using AI and automation capabilities, including watsonx Assistant and watsonx Code Assistant for Z”
RBC (Royal Bank of Canada) is modernizing its IBM Z mainframe environment using watsonx tooling.
“clients such as NatWest and RBC are modernizing their mainframe environments using AI and automation capabilities, including watsonx Assistant and watsonx Code Assistant for Z”
NatWest is modernizing its IBM Z mainframe environment using watsonx tooling.
“Automation grew 7%, with February marking the 1-year anniversary of the acquisition of HashiCorp”
IBM's HashiCorp acquisition passed its one-year anniversary with record bookings, contributing to Automation growth.
“Confluent, which we closed this past quarter, solves that directly. It streams live, governed data to models and agents across the hybrid environment”
IBM closed its Confluent acquisition this quarter, adding live data-streaming to its data portfolio.
“we announced a strategic collaboration with ARM to expand how AI workloads run across IBM infrastructure”
IBM and Arm are collaborating to run the Arm software ecosystem within IBM infrastructure like IBM Z.
“During the quarter, we also announced strategic collaborations with NVIDIA, expanding our work across GPU native analytics”
IBM announced expanded strategic collaboration with NVIDIA across GPU-native analytics.
“With Nestle, we are using NVIDIA accelerated watsonx.data to embed AI directly into core order-to-cash operations, enabling faster real-time insights across Nestle's global supply chain”
Nestle is deploying IBM watsonx.data (on NVIDIA) in its order-to-cash and supply-chain operations.
“Visa continues to work with IBM on ongoing software and data modernization efforts supporting the scale, resiliency and performance of VisaNet”
Visa is an ongoing IBM software/data-modernization customer supporting VisaNet.
“ServiceNow is leveraging watsonx for automated data quality and observability to deliver AI-ready data and code generation to refresh legacy applications to modern application run times, including ServiceNow”
ServiceNow is a watsonx customer, using IBM AI for data quality and legacy-app modernization.
| Company | Score | Trend | Rev YoY |
|---|---|---|---|
IBM International Business Machines Corporation | 8 | +9.5% | |
| ACN Accenture | 8 | +8.3% | |
| BR Broadridge Financial Solutions | 8 | +7.8% | |
| CDW CDW | 8 | +9.3% | |
| CTSH Cognizant | 8 | +5.8% | |
| EPAM EPAM Systems | 8 | +7.6% | |
| FIS Fidelity National Information Services | 7 | +30.1% | |
| FISV Fiserv, Inc. | 3 | -2.0% | |
| IT Gartner | 8 | +2.0% | |
| JKHY Jack Henry & Associates | 8 | +8.7% | |
| LDOS Leidos | 7 | +3.6% |