IBM investors latched onto a sliver of hope as flat — at best — fourth quarter and full-year 2019 results were bolstered by the promise of a better 2020 thanks to its Red Hat-infused cloud business.

Red Hat was the star of the results show, with IBM CFO Jim Kavanaugh repeatedly citing the firm’s $34 billion division as core and key to its Q4 and full-year success in a call with investors. That tone was similar to what IBM set during its Q3 earnings call, which was its first that included Red Hat.

IBM’s Cloud and Cognitive Software business, which is where most of Red Hat’s revenue influence is felt, posted a 9% year-over-year increase in sales to $7.2 billion in Q4. Red Hat’s contribution was just over $1 billion in the quarter, which was its first quarter in the “tres-commas” club.

That IBM division was the main driver for the company in squeaking out a $17 million increase in Q4 revenues. However, a more modest 4.5% full-year increase in Cloud and Cognitive Software revenues was not enough to help 2019 results, which dropped 3% compared with the previous year to $77.1 billion.

Kavanaugh noted that more than 2,000 IBM clients were using its now-bolstered container systems, and that it had signed 21 Red Hat deals in Q4 valued at more than $10 million each. That was double the number of “large” Red Hat-focused deals compared with Q3.

“We have now over 2,000 clients on OpenShift and Cloud Paks, and around services we've signed hundreds of [Red Hat] deals overall, including several design wins in network cloud providers around 5G that will play out as we go through 2020,” Kavanaugh told investors, according to a Seeking Alpha transcript of the call.

IBM did manage to post a nearly 100% year-over-year increase in net income for the quarter, with all of that growth related to income tax provisions. Those provisions also helped IBM post a more modest 8% increase in full-year revenues.

While Red Hat yet again helped boost IBM’s results, some remained realistic on just how much can be expected from the new division.

“Red Hat is helping, but remains a fairly small piece of IBM,” explained Keith Bachman from BMO Capital Markets in a research note.

That sentiment echoed previous comments tied to IBM’s Q3 numbers.

Forrest Research VP and principal analyst Andrew Bartels at that time noted that IBM had done quite a bit to “confuse and muddy” its financial reporting by moving around some of its business units. But overall, he explained that outside of its Red Hat operations, it was “hard to find that it’s growing very much.”

“We are left scratching our heads and asking what’s going on,” Bartels told SDxCentral. “Services are flat, hardware is down, and technology services is down. Only its cloud and cognitive group grew, but stripping out Red Hat and that was also flat. Red Hat is the only growing part at IBM.”

IBM management hinted that its cloud business would continue to be its biggest source of success in 2020, though overall expectations remained flat.

“We ended 2019 on a strong note, returning to overall revenue growth in the quarter, led by accelerated cloud performance," IBM CEO Ginni Rometty noted in a statement. "Looking ahead, this positions us for sustained revenue growth in 2020 as we continue to help our clients shift their mission-critical workloads to the hybrid cloud and scale their efforts to become a cognitive enterprise.”

That seemed enough for investors as IBM’s stock was trading up slightly this morning at around $143 per share.