I don't disagree with your assessment but if you are implying they aren't doing anything else I would disagree with that.
IBM has been around for over a hundred years. That is important because understanding how they have survived can give you an idea of the way they think about things. At several layers they tend to think in very long time frames.
I got to meet a number of the Softlayer managers when our startup was being integrated (Softlayer had people going through the same program) and I got to meet more of them when we did a project to host the Blekko crawler in a Softlayer data center on a number of machines there.
That was a good example for them of a project where the "Colocation/Hosting" model really fell down on the floor. A crawler needs (for example) a bunch of machines that have low latency access to each other as well as the Internet in order to support their storage and indexing models. AWS has 'service layer' clusters where you can subscribe to an "instance" of an elastic search cluster, which then allows you to talk to the service layer while the data center can optimize the communications layer. This is "Web 2.0" architecture which Google and Amazon both developed as part of their data center scale computers effort. The "policy" or "application" layer can be hosted on any machine because it needs only to dispatch requests of the underlying services, whether it be a storage service, an indexing service, or a network crawling service.
Back in 2014 when we were acquired this was still 'new stuff' to Softlayer and they were getting hammered both by our integration needs and the nascent Watson developer cloud for similar reasons. That was combined with billing and finance challenges (IBM is driven by the Finance group :-)) in order to understand costs, expenses, and ROI.
From what I could see from where I was sitting, it was at least a 5 to 10 year effort for them to get to where AWS was a decade ago in their thinking. But advancement from that point on could be more rapid by taking advantage of what had been tried and failed before. So many pieces of the company needed alignment, sales, finance, engineering, management, and operations. To be honest, if I was going to spend the end of my career somewhere it would have been a good project to take on.
So when I read the comment "it's not working very well" my response is "yet" and I agree that that "yet" can be a fairly arduous process within a company the size of IBM.