So after five parts and hundreds of reader comments, what will IBM look like by the end of 2015?  It will look like Oracle.

With earnings per share meaning everything and a headcount mandate that can’t be achieved without totally transforming the company, IBM is turning itself into something very different. Gerstner’s service business that saved the company 20 years ago will be jettisoned, probably to a combination of U.S. and international buyers.

Look for the Global Services business to be sold to one or more Indian companies while the current federal business will be sold to one of IBM’s U.S. competitors.

Meanwhile IBM will move its business toward hardware and applications delivered by partners who carry the Service Level Agreement penalty risk.

Before we move on let’s examine that SLA penalty issue because I think there’s an aspect of this that’s misunderstood in the marketplace.  A decade ago in one of those Aha! moments that transform corporations IBM figured out that it was better to ask forgiveness from its customers than to ask permission. Specifically, IBM modeled two competing scenarios: 1) follow service agreements to the letter, and: 2) ignore service agreements thus saving money and expect to pay penalties as a result.  IBM decided it could make more money — a lot more money — by paying penalties than by actually doing what it was being paid to do.

One individual was rewarded for this stroke of genius, by the way, sanctifying what could be one heck of a class action lawsuit.

Just like Ford deciding it was cheaper for a few customers to die than to improve Pinto fuel tank safety, IBM decided to deliberately cheat its customers. The result is today’s IBM, rotten to the core.

Good riddance.

Meanwhile, IBM has spent lots of money on software product applications and on self-managing hardware. They want to own (not manage) infrastructure which is now hardware and software, not bodies.

Services profit margins are terrible in comparison with combined software and hardware. This two-sided business model has both customers and partners paying. So in Big Data and Enterprise analytics IBM hopes to own analysis and value added reporting.

It doesn’t even require squinting to see this as emulating Oracle. Both companies will have big hardware, big data, big applications, but not big numbers of people that were required by the services model. It’s a transformation of the business that IBM will have no trouble spinning as positive for everyone. Everyone, that is, except the thousands of workers about to be let go.

I wonder how they’ll spin that?