IBM cuts deep into workforce – even its Watson and AI teams – as it 'pivots' to cloud IBM is swinging the axe on its staff, with significant numbers of employees not attached to the cloud being told their time at Big Blue is up. In response to questions from The Register about the extent of and nature of the cuts, the IT grandee did not deny jobs will be lost and declined to offer specific numbers "for …
Not P45s (Pink Slips) which has certainly become a core skill, but hardware.
Which has been abandoned by management in spite of the fact that the niche zSeries mainframe line is the only real money maker the company has left.
While power series may be overpriced it is superb kit.
Ditching the laptop and PC market may have pleased the Wall Street analysts but it pleased Lenovo even more as they acquired a very profitable line in [prestige laptops. (Thinkpads just get better!).
One of the big contract electronics manufacturer (Celestica) got started when IBM built the world most automated laptop manufacturing plant and lost money on the laptops because there were so many managers involved.
They sold it to a group of managers who set up Celestica and sold the laptops at a good price then began to expand.
I worked for Celestica starting in '99 on production test for an IBM product.
Good luck to all the soon to be ex IBM staff. It's not a great environment out there just now, but this will pass and things will get better. Higher quality employers will find a need for you shortly. In the mean time, at least its summer(ish) so outdoors will be a bit more pleasant.
Beer, because everything is better with beer. Except driving.
Still not RA'ed yet ... so keeping head down!
IBM's "Cloud" is pretty much unknown/irrelevant outside of IBM.
About time we stopped trying to play catchup with the hip/trendy internet stuff-on-demand or stuff-as-a-service and stuck to making world class hardware that other companies will then need to do their stuff.
If I can see it, why the hell can't our management? Unless its because from their unique viewpoint, all it looks like is sweaty and brown.
> The whisperer added IBM even looked at cutting its storage and POWER systems businesses loose
It's a shame POWER systems weren't cut loose years ago. Hopefully the market is not so grim they don't have a chance because it's a great product hampered by having to align with the rest of IBM. Perhaps one of the big cloud people will buy them and offer POWER as a service? And the very fine grained slices of processor time the architecture offers would be ideal as a host for serverless.
Funny you should say that. The Risc System/6000 (RS/6000)s were the first systems to use IBM's Power/PowerPC processors. I was product manager for the IBM venture into immersive virtual reality systems in 1995 (yes what is old is new again) using some technology from a company called Virtuality PLC. The IBM graphics bit consisted of a PC card stuffed with 4 of these processors that crunched all the graphics processing on the fly.... Some of the appications were semi-serious business apps/ virtual world demos... some were actually games!
You can get commercial time on a Power cloud over at Integricloud, and I think non-commercial time at a university in Brazil (?), but if you're looking for AWS style stuff you're out of luck at the moment. IBM saying it looked at cutting Power loose entirely won't help adoption there either, in my opinion.
It's a real shame, I love my OpenPower desktop, but it may end up being my last secure machine. Orwell always seems to win in the end, somehow...
When i was last working on power about 5 years ago i set up PowerVM with a number of Power795s, FlashSystem9000s and Storwisev7000s.
It was basically OpenStack on Power connecting directly to the SANs and the HMCs/LPARs and it was fantastic for our environment being able to spin new dev envs in extremely short times as opposed to the normal nonsense. Never got to try to do production loads with it, as i left the company due to manglement being a bunch of jackasses, but it was a valid in-house platform for us anyway.
"some posts were made by staff who recently completed certifications on major cloud platforms but were still let go"
So, you go through the effort of improving your skills on your own time, likely paying for the privilege, and you still not only get no recognition for it, but get the chop.
That is one massive fuck you right there.
Never trust a conglomerate. You're nothing but a number there.
{insert rant} ... rearrange-the-deck-chairs-on-the-titanic .... {insert poorly remembered 3rd party personal anecdotes} ... distressed gorilla at the zoo eating its own vomit ...{continued ranting} ... {something about zombies} ... {conclusion that is really a segway into a vaguely related topic}.
At least that's how I'd expect my post to go if I tried to make sense of IBM's continued existance.
I guess it's true, their staff will probably end up working for a cloud vendor when they leave IBM so this is the most efficient journey to the cloud. It's certainly more fruitful than waiting for IBM to have a real cloud! Their consultants will be finishing the discovery phase any year now, ready for the start of design which will also take 20 years and billions of dollars.
Ahhhh karma :)
Saw the axe first-hand at Lloyds (LBG). Soon as LBG staff were 2p'd over to IBM, there was a mad scramble to get back on the good ship LBG. Them that didn't make it ended up having to go to India with the remit to teach people how to do their job. In 2 weeks. Morale must have been through the floor for permies. It wasn't much better for us contractors. I was given the chop by someone I'd never met over email. Nice touch.
Shareholders really love this arrangement though.
"Shareholders really love this arrangement though."
Not so much. I sold mine several mass firings ago, when there was a brief upwards tick in the share price. Good move, as it turns out.
Interesting, though, that Arvind is slashing the services arms that his two predecessors were so keen on. That does signal some sort of change. But "pivots to cloud"? Two buzzwords in one phrase, so I have no idea what it really means.
Was one of the subcontractors who was 2pd after the main deal as part of a GTS side deal.
Thankfully managed to jump ship a few months after before things got really bad when all of the PM's were also going. Very glad I made the move as much happier in my current place with a much more secure job.
Ironically enough as the new place has an IBM storage preference getting more hands on with IBM san storage than I did when I was working for IBM..
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After surviving 10+ rounds of RA in my 7 years of IBM, I got TUPEd out to a much worse company in the form of Atos. But at least they were honest and told us before we even arrived we were out the door. I've since landed a job (one I actually enjoy) at a UK company that cares about its staff, and it made a refreshing change to attend a town hall meeting where 'meet our business objectives' and 'increase margins' - both IBM code for layoffs were nowhere to be heard. I would have done it sooner but I had TUPEd redundancy rights and a good enough length of service to not let either IBM or Atos off with it!
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