Well done IBM!
Ginny and her management team deserve a healthy payrise for this.
Or are substantial payrises only inversely correlated with performance?
A tenth of a percent still counts, right? With the help of its newest acquisition, namely Red Hat, IBM managed to book a rare yet tiny increase in sales. For the fourth quarter of its 2019 fiscal year, ended December 31: Revenues of $21.77bn were an increase of 0.1 per cent (up 3 per cent adjusted for currency and divested …
As a former IBMer and IT exec at another major global company, I have to say that Rometty is not one to be praising for a job well done.
To be sure, IBM is like the Titanic and you can't turn a ship that big on a short runway.
However, lets count the number of employment related lawsuits. Add to that the missteps as she pivots the company.
The only thing that made sense was the purchase of RedHat, provided that if the rumors I've heard hold true. That its a reverse merger where inept IBM management is cycled out and replaced by RedHat execs.
IBM revenue has been declining quarter on quarter for the 7 years since I left but my absence is finally being noticed and I hope this means the final traces of my malign presence has been eradicated from the P&L. I was only a minor cog in the blue machine but obviously a vital one and who knows what damage I might have caused if I'd been allowed spend another decade embedding myself.
No matter how many employees they will fire, I think they still have too many. I once tried to buy an IBM server. The employees I talked to on the phone were absolutely incompetent. The website listing their partners was horrendously out of date. Finally I asked to be connected with someone competent, for a change (I really did phrase it this way!). Surprisingly, I got that person. I learned who really sells the servers in my area. However their partner sold me... a Lenovo server after asking me "Do you really want to overpay?"