What's big, blue, and hands out pink slips? IBM on Thursday: Word spreads of job cuts IBM is once again understood to be warning some staff they face the chop in a number of its divisions. Both the Watching IBM group and multiple posts on job board The Layoff say unlucky workers in the Watson Health, Cloud Services, and Global Technology Services (GTS) Infrastructure Services Delivery units had been notified …
Of course they do, Ginni wants a new Yacht but doesn't want something old from the existing market so she will have to diversify and choose something from the emerging marketplace.
Yachts don't design and build themselves you know....
You have a 90 day notice where you are still being paid your salary. At the end, you have 1 month severance package. Then that's it... or you could volunteer to be sent to a boot camp for new training and keep your job.
Free clue. Take the boot camp while you still have your resume on the streets. Free training never hurt anyone.
if you buy well, incentivise the employees well and integrate the services well.
But not if your execs are solely focussed on staying alive and paying themselves huge bonuses while cutting anyone who spends their time working rather than playing politics.
It’s no coincidence that companies on the up tend to do well at this. They have owner/operators making calm decisions and integrating people into aspirational places to work with share options that are increasing in value.
IBM have a poisonous executive team trying to convince people they’ve bought to join a tired and scared workforce using worthless share options and a culture of suddenly firing the wrong people.
How would any acquisition work?
Shareholders should have split IBM up years ago before the decline became terminal.
Offer poor service provided by underpaid under skilled staff. >
See profits drop, as customers leave for a competitor offering better service >
Chop even more staff to lower cost and consequently quality of service >
See profits drop, as customers leave for a competitor offering better service >
Rinse and repeat, while throwing in occasional CEO swaps, bonuses and golden parachutes
Keep doing this for 5 years until the next mainframe hardware refresh.
Point to the revenue increase and say without irony "we've turned the corner, not only are mainframe sales growing but also unrelated products like mainframe storage and mainframe software"
Pretend to be relevant in IT while accountants grind every last cent out of every revenue stream.
Repeat 5 year cycle.
They're trying to monetize it. Haven't you seen their 'survey' which really only wants to know if you would like to pay to have "a faster experience"?
Fun weather fact: Houston doesn't have a weather radar channel on their cable offerings. You know, hurricane Rita 2005, hurricane Ike 2008, floods from rain in 2015 and 2016, hurricane Harvey 2017 - that Houston. Gee, there ought to be a governmental solution for supplying critical weather info, huh?
It's a new quarter at the company, of COURSE they have new layoffs. It's a regularly-scheduled quarterly process; look at the totals of losses for that quarter, then calculate the number of people you have to lay off to massage/hack the numbers.
By the time the RedHat acquisition goes through, RH will have more employees than the remaining IBM.
This is .005 of IBM's workforce. This is like a small business with 200 employees laying off one person. That doesn't make headlines, and certainly doesn't say -anything- about that small business. And some goofy commenter above made a crack about IBM's cloud. If I wanted to store my photos or back up my hard drive, or calculate when a baseball team should steal a base or how long a home run was, I'd use Amazon's or Microsoft's cloud. If I wanted to do complex and business critical data analytics in a secure and bulletproof environment, well, I wouldn't use those guys. Also, go to weather.com RIGHT NOW and see how long it takes to load. Hint: 'Bout as long as amazon.com. Bashing IBM seems to be fun for stupid people.
"This is .005 of IBM's workforce. This is like a small business with 200 employees laying off one person"
Aren't you just repeating IBM's internal line that they feed to new employee's TUPE'd into IBM? IBM are still cycling through 15k-20k people a year through resource actions (ref: https://www.statista.com/statistics/265007/number-of-employees-at-ibm-since-2000/). Add in another 10%+ for staff choosing to move for other reasons and its no wonder IBM is struggling to retain skilled staff.
"And some goofy commenter above made a crack about IBM's cloud."
OK, now I know you're internal. Define IBM's cloud? Are you referring to the part that's old-style hosting (complete with 1990's efficiency and costs), Softlayer v1 (like Rackspace/other providers but without the flexibility and at a significant mark up) or Softlayer v2 (if you are nostalgic for AWS/Azure from 10 years ago when you had minimal control over what you could do). When I load weather.com, NoScript kills it so I'm not sure how well it runs, but it gives me a good idea of what IBM are trying to do.
Has IBM decided who they will move to like Oracle has? Or is your mention of Amazon confirmation that it will be AWS as IBM policy is anything but Microsoft and Google is too big a competitor in the ads business to risk using them?
Your comments regarding cloud were correct two years ago, but not now, take a look. UX on weather.com is fine. The stats reference is sadly spot on but is also symptomatic of a company in transformation, as legacy deals shrink and new offerings take time to gain market share.
RA's are part of that process.
"Your comments regarding cloud were correct two years ago, but not now, take a look. "
I would put Azure 1-2 years behind AWS in terms of features. Yes you can do most things in Azure, but its often significantly easier in AWS and with more functionality available. How far would you put IBM's cloud solutions behind Azure now? IBM were investing
IBM has high staff turnover in comparison to other IT companies at 13%. On top of that they've been RAing significant numbers of people for that last 5+years which is why they're at 340k from 430k in 2013 and likely to be at 300k by 2021 if you exclude RedHat that will likely still be in the early acquisition phase.
As for the 8000 job vacancies, does anyone involved in a RA ever move to one of these vacancies? Maybe 1 in 1000?
My experience with IBM showed a distinct lack of ability to execute, we sat around in meetings talking about things, identified key decision points and set timeframes for getting information and decisions. The majority of those involved made no obvious attempt at fulfilling their obligations and "standard IBM" solutions they proposed couldn't be delivered due to software issues, process issues or a straight lack of understanding of who would deliver as they always hoped it would be somebody else.
And as the months went by, the competent ones left, waiting and hoping for a RA payout just wasn't worth the pain or unhappiness.
It's not the percentage, but rather the implied targeting of older workers with good performance records. A process that only seems to be repeating itself.
A number of people get murdered every year, but we still mourn for the statistically insignificant loss. Sorry 2000 layoffs doesn't make your radar.
WeatherUnderground takes a LONG time to load.
It loads weather for the US in F, realises who I am, reloads weather for my local area then usually does it again cos I have my temperatures in C.
Not to mention they closed the APIs for WU. I know they're giving the WU service for free, but they're also getting a huge amount of weather data that they should be able to monetise somehow...
I wanted to store my photos or back up my hard drive, or calculate when a baseball team should steal a base or how long a home run was, I'd use Amazon's or Microsoft's cloud. If I wanted to do complex and business critical data analytics in a secure and bulletproof environment, well, I wouldn't use those guys.
If IBM’s management really believe this, it explains a lot!
IBM suffers from the danger of instant gratification. The problem started during Sam P's tenure when IBM started managing the company to please Wall Street. Every earnings report had to be rosy. The company was manged, serious cost cuts were made to achieve that goal. That put many of their lines of business into a death spiral. Now they need new lines of business and they are too impatient to spend the years it may take to develop them.
It takes over a decade to develop new medical products and services. Years are needed for R&D, testing, and the regulatory work. IBM's Watson Health work had great potential. The fact they gave up on it in a couple short years shows IBM really does not know how to operate in the health care industry. They were looking for instant gratification, instant profits, a nice pop of their quarterly earning statement. Spending $100M's over 10 years is incomprehensible to them.
IBM is still a very large and profitable company. The problem is their existing business are shrinking and layoffs needed. The new businesses are not growing fast enough, nor are they covering the decline of the rest of the company. IBM use to be a $100B/year company. Now it is below $80B. It is getting smaller each year. The big question for IBM is 'do you want to be a $100B, 80B, or 50B per year company?' If the company wants to GROW it needs to be managed differently. It needs to seriously invest in itself, not pander to Wall Street. The stock buybacks must be suspended. The company should plan on returning smaller profits. A lot more money needs to be invested into the business. And, most important. IBM needs leaders who know how to manage for growth, who know how to build new businesses,
I worked at IBM for 20 years. You can't imagine how many great businesses IBM has neglected over the years. Global Services could be very relevant today if it were managed better, made more efficient (not by moving jobs to cheap labor markets), and saw smart investments in the business. The world needs more storage, a lot more storage. IBM doesn't make the storage the world needs. The R&D needed to make the storage products needed is trivially easy. It is all open source technology. If IBM were willing to operate the division as a high volume, commodity, lower margin business they could be THE major player in the market.
IBM's problem is it is managing the company to please Wall Street. Wall Street does not provide IBM's income. They are really not a customer. IBM's real customers have been subjected to terrible service and over priced products. They are shopping elsewhere and each year in increasing numbers. It is sad to watch.
A comment about long term strategy. In many industries, healthcare among them, the regulators will have a final say on whether many products can even be released for general sale. Some industries, again healthcare among them, have various government blacklists if someone is one they cannot work in the industry or certain positions (see E. Holmes; Thranos). I've Been Moved is not used to operating in these industries and does not understand how to cultivate working relationships with the local regulators; the type were you can get good guidance about policy issue from the agency. Also, in many of these industries each country/region has regulations that differ in detail to the point you need local knowledge of each to avoid unforced errors.
The problem is that Wall Street is essential to the US business model. They hold your pension hostage. They hold the loans. You (the American public) are intermediated from the actual economy by them. Your money - and your debt- gives them the power to tell your company to lay you off, in fact.
In China this doesn't happen so Chinese companies are much freer to make longer term business decisions. Freedom! Ain't it wonderful?
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IBM has a habit of purchasing awesome technology and completely ruining it. One of the best Storage Platforms I've worked on was XIV. IBM purchased XIV, did a horrible job marketing the line and eventually dropped it in favor of the V7000s. More recently they acquired CleverSafe (now re-branded as IBM Cloud Object Storage) yet they focus on their competing products. I worked with CleverSafe and thought it was an amazing on-prem cloud solution. Unfortunately for them, IBM is now letting it whither away.
These actions mean IBM is no longer able to develop or support many products or services.
Clearly cutting GTS means close to the box services will disappear, so don't expect to get support anytime soon. I can also see loss making products like the Storage Range disappearing, no money in flogging other vendors disks/SSDs and no amount of SDS will cover it. It is hardly surprising IBM is now a minor vendor in the Supercomputer Top500 and clings to a few high margin mainframe sales.
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