Assets certainly appear to be being shuffled. Lower-value commodity hardware is being transfered to China (see - Google sells Motorola Mobility to Lenovo) and the sellers are exiting to concentrate on software.

Last week IBM sold its server business to Lenovo as well and it now looks as though it may be working to offload its Software Defined Networks (SDN) effort - at least according to ‘reports’, which say it is touting it around with a $1 billion price tag.

First thought: why exit SDN, one of the big and growing markets over the next few years and certainly a key component in the broader 'cloud' market? All true, but it's also a a fairly finite sort of a play and one that already has a large number of very keen and specialised players bustling about in it. IBM has no special pedigree in SDN that might give it a better than even chance of sucess.

As we reported just over a week ago, IBM shuffled its Cloud software portfolio - out with its old, in with its newly purchased (see - Back to the bureau: IBM follows up on SoftLayer purchase), so there’s certainly signs that a major reshuffle is under way. And it's also true that cloud services, complete with infrastructure assets, data centre space and deployed as a global play, is probably a better fit with IBM's size and strengths.

As we had it last week for IBM it's 'back to the bureau' only scaled up about a million times.

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