By Don Clark 

Facing an uphill battle to boost revenue, International Business Machines Corp. is mounting a high-stakes campaign to become a top player in cloud services. Now that push has a new point man.

Robert LeBlanc, a 33-year Big Blue veteran, was named the leader of a new dedicated cloud unit in early January. He reports directly to CEO Virginia Rometty, overseeing cloud-related businesses that IBM says are generating about $7 billion in annual revenue--a target the company reached a year earlier than it expected--and growing at a 60% clip.

That's still only about 7.5% of the $92.8 billion in annual revenue IBM reported last week. The announcement underscored the fact that the company's older software and services businesses remain considerably bigger--and in a tailspin.

"For now, the fall-off in the traditional businesses is dwarfing IBM's ability to capture new revenue opportunities as the market shifts," wrote Toni Sacconaghi, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein, in a note following IBM's announcement.

Mr. LeBlanc, 56 years old, acknowledged that IBM must move fast to make the cloud pay off--something his new position was designed to help accomplish. "We want to continue to drive for speed," he said in an interview.

He has taken on big jobs before. In the late 1990s, when the Internet was picking up steam at many companies, he played a key role in a heavily advertised "e-business" push that helped connect traditional back-end systems to the Web.

IBM's cloud push comprises a few dissimilar activities. One is software as a service, a term that refers to programs that once would have been installed on customer computers but now are served up over the Web. Martin Schroeter, IBM's chief financial officer, said software as a service contributed nearly $3.5 billion the company's roughly $7 billion in annual revenue from the cloud. The best-known provider of online software is Salesforce.com Inc., whose revenue for the year ending January 31 is projected by analysts at $5.4 billion.

A large portion of IBM's remaining $3.5 billion cloud revenue comes from data centers that run customers' own applications, a business known as infrastructure as a service, based on the $2 billion acquisition of SoftLayer in 2013. By comparison, Amazon.com Inc.'s competing AWS division may post nearly $6 billion in revenue in 2015, up from $4.3 billion in 2014, predicts Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster.

Mr. LeBlanc, a senior vice president, previously led a group that included the cloud-based software offerings--which the company says number over 100-- as well as leading its conventional software businesses. He also supervised Bluemix, a set of tools to help programmers build Web and mobile applications.

Now he also oversees the former SoftLayer unit, which is trying to differentiate itself with a global network that spans 49 data centers and counting. In addition to new Softlayer operations in Frankfurt, Mexico City and Tokyo, IBM in December announced plans to work with data-center operator Equinix Inc. to offer additional facilities in Australia, France, Japan, Singapore, the Netherlands and the US. It has also cut deals with Germany's SAP SE and China's Tencent Holdings Ltd. to create additional cloud offerings.

Mr. LeBlanc aims to serve customers who want to run applications on their own computers and outsource others--an arrangement called a hybrid cloud --while also serving customers in countries like Germany who want to keep their applications and data nearby because of security worries and local data sovereignty laws.

"That whole distributed data center model is really playing well with a lot of clients," Mr. LeBlanc says. "They do worry about where the application is running."

The company has unleashed a stream of cloud-related announcements, some with sizeable dollar values. Last week, for example, IBM said the health-care company Anthem Inc. agreed to pay nearly $500 million over five years for services that would help Anthem integrate its apps delivered via the cloud with those run in its own facilities.

Such deals, however, don't necessarily provide a short-term boost to IBM's income statement. Where sales of conventional on-site software are recorded as revenue up front, portions of revenue from software delivered online and other cloud services are booked gradually, often on a monthly basis.

Mr. LeBlanc acknowledges that keeping pace with rivals will require the 103-year-old company to develop new skills. Part of the solution is expected to come from hiring; he estimates the cloud group has 1,000 job openings.

Steven Milunovich, an analyst at UBS Securities, says investors are trying to figure out whether IBM stands to gain more by moving its customers to the cloud than it will lose in on-site software licensing. The company does have advantages, he said, particularly a base of customers who run IBM mainframes or other hardware.

Though IBM's brand in the cloud lags that of some rivals, Mr. Milunovich said, the company appears to be ahead of some other competitors. "I would give them at least a solid B for their efforts," he said.

Write to Don Clark at don.clark@wsj.com

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