As someone old enough to remember the 1984 Apple ad that assailed IBM as big brother, I am willing to bet Big Blue will pull through and to be amused by Apple collaborating with IBM. The areas IBM is betting heavily on include data analytics, cloud computing and corporate mobile and social computing. At a meeting with analysts in May, company executives called them its “strategic imperatives.” They span IBM’s services, software and hardware businesses and mostly contribute to the revenue of the services and software units. Steven Milunovich, an analyst at UBS, estimates that these businesses account for 21 percent of IBM’s revenue.