back to article IBM old guard dropping like flies in POWER and cloud restructure

IBM software veteran Robert LeBlanc is stepping down after just two years heading the firm's growing cloud business. Chief executive Ginni Rometty announced LeBlanc's planned departure on Wednesday as part of a restructuring of IBM's cloud and POWER hardware units. LeBlanc, who joined IBM in 1981, will retire in June. IBM has …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Too Bad.

    Picciano should have been given the boot too.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    We are aggressively reinventing our systems portfolio

    by getting the techies out, and keeping the beancounters in.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: We are aggressively reinventing our systems portfolio

      Systems, in general, are rapidly commoditizing. This has been going for years with companies moving to Linux on whatever x86 server is least costly as their compute standard, away from costly proprietary systems. The model of the future will be Google's model (AWS is trying to do what Google does) where you have zero proprietary systems or software in the infrastructure. Not a lick of IBM, Cisco, Oracle, EMC, etc... or even Intel in the near future. The cloud hyper scalers will then scale that incredibly low cost (and high reliability, performance) model to the moon.

  3. Nate Amsden

    "We are aggressively reinventing our systems portfolio for cloud, data and AI,"

    Maybe those jobs are going to WATSON

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    After 16y with IBM one thing I learned, that company could lose 80% of execs/VPs and no one would notice. There are so many execs playing constant musical chairs with no apparent actual job responsibilities that I wonder how much more profitable they'd be if they went from the 13 levels of management that were above me down to half that.

  5. teterkin

    "We are aggressively reinventing..."

    I love IBM, it's Power systems and Storage, but IBM Cloud (Bluemix) service is slack-baked. Recently I wrote 4 or 5 letters to their Support and none of them was answered by human. After few days I went to their chat and finally got some kind of answer (which didn't help me anyway). On the contrary, yesterday, I had to recover loss of my Multi-Factor Authentication device for Amazon AWS. Just in 10 minutes after my message I got a phone call from US and in 5 minutes we were done. The engineer was professional, fast and polite. It used to be like that in IBM too. :(

  6. John Smith 19 Gold badge
    WTF?

    IBM has a cloud service?

    Who knew?

    That said since for a lot of us "cloud" is just "huge frigging mainframe," I'd guess a company that makes a lot of mainframes should be able to run such a service quite well.

    Although it appears they do not.

    1. GruntyMcPugh

      Re: IBM has a cloud service?

      'Cloud' requires a huge change of culture within IBM, it used to be the goal to sell hardware, then sell support and services on the back of that, basically the customer gives IBM money, then IBM makes more money.

      Cloud requires IBM investing in hardware up front, at it's own cost, then just selling a service. The Hardware and support revenue is a recoverable cost now. That's a bit precarious, and others are providing serious competition, Google, Rackspace, AWS, etc,.... customers are also expecting cost savings, so this is also a race to the bottom.

    2. Beachrider

      If you think that 'cloud' is a huge frigging mainframe...

      Then you don't understand the offering from cloud providers. They dominantly provide virtualized Intel platforms with Windows or Linux. Faaaaaaaaaaar from mainframes....

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: If you think that 'cloud' is a huge frigging mainframe...

        True but a single IBM mainframe can host hundreds of virtual Linux boxes.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    This month's rearranging of the deck chairs is complete!

    Shuffleboard on the afterdeck at 1PM.

    Extra ice is available at the big hole by the new engine room swimming pool.

    1. Yes Me Silver badge
      Unhappy

      Re: This month's rearranging of the deck chairs is complete!

      Yes, one batch of know-nothings replaced by another. There was a time when IBM SVPs actually understood technology, not just MBA stuff. Funnily enough, the company had better products and services then, and they had customers.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I was 26 years with IBM and every time I read one of these stories I'm right back there in the day. No change. I reckon Ginni Rometty just ponders... how did we do this before?

  9. Hargrove

    Huh?

    We are aggressively reinventing our systems portfolio for cloud, data and AI," Rometty said. "The centrepiece of Cognitive Systems is our Power franchise, which is vital to so many clients and ecosystem partners. Having envisioned and transformed our data and analytics portfolio, Bob is ideally suited for this role

    Inconceivable. "An' I do not thin' those words min what they thin' they min.'" Or anything of substance for that matter.

    And by the way--Bob's your uncle, (Been looking to sneak that into a post for a couple of years now.)

  10. asesh

    Guards who are old looses its sharpness quicker over the years. IBM is no different.

    New team will take over the vacuum left by old professionals. IBM has the resilience to storm over such transition. All is well.

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Does IBM even sell AIX on Power?

    IBM sells Intel based servers .. something you wouldn't even find in a IBM building 20 years ago.

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