Franklin Resources vs IBM
Side-by-side comparison of AI visibility scores, market position, and capabilities
San Mateo CA global asset manager (NYSE: BEN) ~$1.65T AUM, $5.2B FY2024 revenue; Legg Mason/Putnam multi-boutique, Western Asset outflows from 2024 regulatory issues, competing with BlackRock and Fidelity.
About
Franklin Resources, Inc. (Franklin Templeton) is a San Mateo, California-based global investment management company — publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE: BEN) as an S&P 500 Financials component — managing mutual funds, ETFs, institutional separate accounts, and alternative investments across fixed income, equity, multi-asset, and alternative strategies through approximately 10,000 employees serving clients in 165 countries. In fiscal year 2024 (ending September 2024), Franklin Templeton reported assets under management of approximately $1.65 trillion and revenues of approximately $5.2 billion, with the company navigating the transition from traditional active management toward alternative investments and ETF expansion following the transformative 2020 acquisition of Legg Mason ($4.5 billion — adding Western Asset Management, Brandywine Global, Clarion Partners, and other boutique managers) and subsequent acquisitions including Benefit Street Partners (credit), Lexington Partners (secondary private equity), and Putnam Investments (2023 acquisition expanding retirement plan distribution). CEO Jenny Johnson leads Franklin Templeton's multi-boutique strategy: preserving the investment independence of each acquired brand (Western Asset Management operates as an autonomous fixed income manager, Clarion Partners as a standalone real estate manager) while sharing back-office, compliance, distribution, and technology infrastructure to extract operating leverage from the combined firm's $5+ billion revenue base.
Armonk NY hybrid cloud and enterprise AI (NYSE: IBM) at $62.8B revenue; $6B+ generative AI bookings, record $12.7B free cash flow 2024, DataStax acquisition for watsonx vector database competing with Microsoft Azure for enterprise AI.
About
International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) is an Armonk, New York-based global technology and consulting company — publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE: IBM) as an S&P 500 component — providing hybrid cloud infrastructure, artificial intelligence software, and enterprise IT consulting through approximately 270,300 employees in 170 countries with $62.8 billion in annual revenue. Founded on June 16, 1911, as Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company through a merger orchestrated by financier Charles Ranlett Flint, renamed IBM in 1924 under Thomas Watson Sr., IBM has undergone multiple strategic transformations over its 110+ year history: building the System/360 mainframe platform (1964), launching the IBM PC (1981), selling the PC division to Lenovo (2005, $1.75B), and completing the $34 billion Red Hat acquisition (2019) that repositioned IBM as a hybrid cloud platform company. CEO Arvind Krishna (appointed April 2020) has focused IBM's strategy on three areas: hybrid cloud (powered by Red Hat OpenShift, the enterprise Kubernetes platform), AI (the watsonx platform for enterprise AI model development and deployment), and enterprise consulting. Under Krishna, IBM recorded $12.7 billion in free cash flow in 2024 (a company record), surpassed $6 billion in generative AI bookings since June 2023, and saw the stock price double — trading at all-time highs through 2024-2025. IBM announced the DataStax acquisition in 2025 to deepen watsonx's data layer with AstraDB (vector database for AI applications), DataStax Enterprise (Apache Cassandra), and Langflow (low-code AI agent development).
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