IBM to spin out Managed Infrastructure Services biz – yes, the one that was subject to all those redundancies IBM has confirmed a "tax-free" spin-off of its Managed Infrastructure Services unit into a separately traded public company, expunging a part of Big Blue that has been shrinking and subject to years of cost-cutting. The division of Global Technology Services will get a brand spanking new name – NewCo – and IBM sought to talk …
They put the name as a place holder as it was 5PM with the intention of updating it the next day.
When they arrived the next day, they found they had been made redundant so it never got done.
The task has been handed over to a project manager in a lower cost part of the world and when a suitable replacement is hired in 3-6 months the task will be completed.
What AC said. NewCo is a generic name that companies are given before they’re fully formed, so discussions and legal frameworks can be drawn up without having to be rushed into coming up with a name/logo etc already.
It means nothing, and will (almost) certainly be changed to a RealName some time between now and the actual spinoff date.
One demerit point to the Reg for not pointing this out in the article.
The rules don't say staff aren't allowed to know about such things, just that they aren't allowed to talk about them to anyone outside the company.
Whether the company chooses to tell they minions is up to the company. Some do, some don't.
(Just been through an IPO; we were told about it way in advance and reminded many times about insider trading rules).
Exactly. When I worked at a listed company they would announce new stuff (often market sensitive, e.g. results) to employees at 1630 i.e. after the markets closed. The public announcement, to the markets and the great unwashed, was at 0700 the following morning just before the markets opened.
We were all told multiple times that some information was confidential until the next morning, with an exteded remix of the company's insider trading rules, and that some information was completely confidential as it was internal and wouldn't be announced publicly. That way the company did employees the courtesy of telling them first, without causing too big an insider trading risk beyond the C-Suite.
TBH there was no reason IBM needed to annouce this to the markets before employees, other than being shits, and that's not exactly news.
So what's left now - some research divisions, some patents and Red Hat. Red Hat is a great contrtbutor ot opensource but it's not the world of cloud entirely - AWS isn't Red Hat, Canonical want to eat Red Hat's lunch in managed cloud infrastructure that isn't AWS ...what pays the bills? Attack dog lawyers may save something but ...
So "ibm" will be left with a cloud service that isn't competitive or modern and no one wants, and an "ai" division that is total rubbish and those that have been suckered into buying it get out as soon as they can?
What could possibly go wrong!
Mega bonus to Ginni as a final hurrah....
So: 45-50 years in IT. Retired a little over a year ago.
Last 10 of which was as a Service Delivery Manager responsible for oversight of the IBM delivery of (in my little slice of the world) mainframe services. Note that this is a large healthcare enterprise: serving over 10 million members, across 8-10 states, with 300,000 employees... including 80,000 physicians, and a massive, robust, EHR system. Mainframe is a teeny-tiny piece of this (even at north of 30K MIPS), but (as mainframer's might expect) a critical component of several key applications.
IBM Global Services operates pretty much the entire infrastructure; mainframe, *NIX, Wintel, etc.
My heart goes out to my (former) IBM partners, my (former) teammates on the Service Delivery team, and my (former) employer, who remains my healthcare provider.
I hope IBM doesn't screw things up with this transition as (overly dramatic music plays in the background) people's health and even lives depend on IBM GS services maintaining operational stability of the systems they support.
Look up https://forums.theregister.com/forum/1/2015/07/20/ibm_q2_2015_results_mainframes_middleware/ when I said
"All I can see is IBM slowly fading into irrelevance and reducing itself to two almost independent companies: one a very small, highly profitable, cluster of captive mainframe customers (these will remain IBM customers literally forever) Another made of the small army of lawyers, this time specialising in patent licensing. But this part will not last more than 30 years: on the long term, IBM can't sustain any significant R&D investment if they can't turn it into profits outside patents, something they have been unable to achieve for the last 20 years."
It has now started...
IBM has practiced such reprehensible behavior with its business and employees that I hope people in IT leadership positions are taking note and looking for (slightly) less scummy alternatives. If enough people would make the ethical decision to not patronize companies that treat their employees like crap, the world would be a better place. Now excuse me, I'm off to see the glorious blue sunrise with my unicorn..
(NewCo, really??)
IBM have been itching to dump the Managed Infrastructure Services division for years.
For years & years, thousands of IBM GTS employees haven been made redundant and with the new CEO his 'great plan' is to just dump the division and run... oh probably taking massive bonus for the trouble!
If you watched the CEO's 'All hands call' the day after the announcement to the stock markets there was an odd video with no social distancing and masks being taken off/on and then in the end they just didn't bother LOL! The next day Arvind Krishna had a Q&A meeting, answering a few IBMers questions posted on SLACK. You could tell he wasn't in the mood and gave short, sharp answers then decided to end the Q&A & cut the video link abruptly.... which was nice, not!
It will be interesting to find out what happens to those IBMers in this 'NewCo' i.e. existing employee rights, pensions and even what global offices they can work from, if any? You can already see this isn't going to end well for IBM and this 'NewCo' as IBM are nowhere near Amazon & Microsoft for Cloud services. The 'NewCo' will be taken over by another corporate co. just to access the clients on their books and they will then dump thousands of old IBM employees.
Thanks a lot IBM.
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