The aggressive target, set by IBM executives at the company’s annual investor meeting in New York on Thursday, is the latest step for the technology giant towards emerging, high-margin businesses, and away from its previous strongholds in hardware and servers. The $40 billion will come from areas which IBM calls its “strategic imperatives,” namely cloud, analytics, mobile, social and security software. The company said it would shift $4 billion in spending to its “strategic imperatives” this year. IBM revenue has now fallen for the past 11 quarters, while earnings growth has been sporadic.