IBM seems pretty excited about cloud and its other new technologies, but meanwhile, the rest of the company continues to decline.

On the bright side, yesterday's second-quarter earnings report beat Wall Street expectations. Big Blue's shares saw a small uptick after-hours but are trading flat this morning.

Revenues overall fell to $20.2 billion, compared with $20.8 billion in the year-ago quarter. Net income was $2.5 billion, or $2.61 per share, compared with $3.58 billion, or $3.50 per share, a year ago.

Non-GAAP net income of $2.95 beat the analyst consensus of $2.89, according to Thomson Financial.

The good news was that strategic imperatives — including cloud initiatives, analytics, and Watson — grew 12 percent in revenues during the quarter and now make up 38 percent of total revenues.

Cloud revenue rose 30 percent year-over-year to $3.4 billion and now has an annual run rate of $11.6 billion. "Cloud" includes services such as IBM Cloud as well as sales of hardware and software for customers who build their own clouds.

IBM has been occasionally enhancing its cloud business via acquisitions. Most recently, the company completed its purchase of EZsource, which helps move mainframe applications to the cloud. In November, it picked up cloud broker, Gravitant.

The company also got a nice chunk of business for IBM Cloud in December when it took over AT&T's managed hosting services.