Maybe it’s because my head’s in the cloud so much, but I view IBM’s planned divestiture of its server business as a direct response to the growing threat it sees from Amazon(s amzn). Simplistic, yes, but that doesn’t make it wrong.

Here’s how AWS drove (or at the very least helped drive) IBM(s ibm) to act:

1. In the past 3 years AWS emerged, like an aircraft carrier out of the fog, as a prodigious competitor to IBM in IT services. The fact that AWS won the CIA cloud contract over IBM despite quoting a higher price, crystallized that for anyone who had doubts
2. Buying trends among Amazon and its webscale cousins Facebook(s fb), Google(s goog), Yahoo(s yhoo) pulled the rug out from under brand-name X86 server makers. These companies thirst for simple, cheap hardware and increasingly they either design their own boxes to be built by white-box providers like Quanta…