BM has been investing heavily and shifting its resources into several high-growth initiatives, which it has dubbed strategic imperatives. This consists of areas like analytics, cloud computing, artificial intelligence (AI), security, and mobile. Revenue from those activities achieved quarterly sales of $11.1 billion, up 17% year over year, and now account for 46% of IBM's total revenue.
IBM reported cloud-computing revenue that increased to $5.5 billion, up 30% year over year, and growing to $17 billion for the full year, an increase of 24%. Analytics revenue grew 9%, mobile sales jumped 23%, and security revenue soared 132%, all over the prior-year quarter.
IBM pointed out that the 10 largest global banks, nine of the top 10 retailers, and eight of the top 10 airlines are customers of IBM Cloud. The company also announced that it led the U.S. in patents during 2017, "marking our twenty-fifth consecutive year at number one." Nearly half of those patents, which exceeded 9,000 in all, were in the fields of AI, cloud computing, cybersecurity, blockchain, and quantum computing.
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