Thread regarding IBM layoffs

IBM will be looking to layoff massively to pay for that purchase... get ready for it.
RTO to be mandatory and enforced. Fun, Fun, Fun!

Broadcom was not the savior for CA, nor VMware.

More like the grim reaper.

@2efs The z platform could continue on its natural evolution as a part of a different firm. There is no need (nor is it necessarily desirable) to force customers off the platform. Mainframes are around for the same reason semi trucks are used...they work, and for their intended purposes they work extremely well. Mainframes and z/OS (and related stuff) may or may not be any good for AI-related work or hosting video games, but they are a time-tested platform for much of the tasks that make our society run...payroll, taxes, travel reservations, debit and credit card authorizations, etc. z will live on for as long as it is needed, and that will ultimately be determined by enterprise customers and governments. If they need it, then it will continue.

I think it's safe to say, however, that the world is more than ready to move on from a dysfunctional, top-heavy and utterly corrupt company. No matter what your views are on IBM's technology portfolio, IBM's corporate governance for the past few decades has been viewed by most observers as just plain bad. The technology, the employees, and the customer base are better off in someone else's hands.

@2kjm you ain't seen nuthin' yet. watson code assistant just set the new bar. go ahead and give it a try! you probably can't because it is being very carefully shown to customers. Carefully for a very good reason: it is basically garbage.

@2rom

Company 1 should be turned into a kind of mutual trust company. That technology is now too important to the economy (and even society) of much of the world. It is simply too important to be left in the hands of people like Arvind and Rob Thomas.

The goals of the company (which will be run by major customers and financial regulators) will include:

• ensuring continued support for all of the products mentioned for as long as necessary;
• a very clear and focused mission to expedite every customer moving work off of the platform;

It should be clear that there will be fewer revs of the z architecture going forward and those will only contain features that either there is general agreement that customers want or simply keep up with current chip technology.

The (new) company should develop technology to move away from ancient artifacts such as EBCDIC. It should also work towards finding elements of existing work loads that can be offloaded to more current platforms. This may necessitate translating existing cobol to better languages. (I suggest that AI might not be the answer here. Arvind and Rob are convinced that it can do something but no one has seen any good results.)

The flip side is that there should be extremely limited new development of z/OS or IMS or any of those other products. The main focus of the (new) company must be to encourage moving work off an unwieldy platform and onto a modern platform. Anything that acts as an enabler for customers staying on the platform is unhelpful.

This really needs to be done for the good of all of us who have an interest in a functional economic system. The history is not really important but where we are is: a dysfunctional company run by fools owns a lot of technology that is critical to the way of life of a lot of us. This technology really doesn't have an awesome future anyway. It's mostly pretty terrible. So a concerted effort should be made to retire it as much as possible.

I am not normally given to socialized corporate ownership or government participation in corporate ownership. But it is abundantly clear that the company that owns this key technology has utterly lost its way and cannot be trusted.

2rom It all boils down to who feeds the consulting machine. If your HW products catalyse consulting hours, IBM wants you. Otherwise IBM can’t afford to keep you as you don’t feed their strategy. Mainframe feeds the machine via SW modernization, and hybrid. Power feeds the machine via SAP/Oracle and maybe another 10 big ISV’s. Small power and most of storage don’t feed the machine thus will be gone. The exception is really big storage that attaches to enterprise boxes.

There is no company on the planet that can successfully take over IBM in its present form. IBM has so much technology and support-related stuff in its "legacy products" that no modern IT company could adequately replace IBM. In other words, only IBM can be IBM...nobody else can be a substitute.

That said, it wouldn't be hard to see the following:

1. Separate IBM into two firms: "IBM classic" and "everything else". IBM classic has System Z and the mainframe software products that we all know (if not love): z/VM, z/OS, z/TPF, CICS, IMS, DB2, among others.
2. Put everything else into the new company and sell it to whoever will buy it. This is somewhat controversial, because what do you do with Power (System P, System i and storage depend on it). I don't know enough about their marketshare at the moment, but for now I'd say let someone else buy them. This also includes DB2 UDB, Websphere and MQ. (This split isn't clean, I admit, because there are both MF and non-MF versions of all that stuff.)
3. IBM classic has the top enterprise customers who want mainframe stuff. They can afford it, and they'll get the prestige service and support that they are used to anyway.
4. All other customers go to other companies, including the "everything else" company if it survives as a standalone entity.

IBM software is a mix of useless components. The Cloud offering is abysmal, the Power Virtual Server offering is no better. IBM attempt in Power AI failed miserably.
No software worth mentioning was developed within its wall in recent years.
IBM is full of overpaid incompetent engineers and executives.

@2rsc+1q85BCGP

Looks like you are an insider well placed... can we get more details?

One of these days, IBM will definitely get bought out... Most likely by one of the Hyperscalers, not by Meta though.

There are some internal discussions about Meta buying IBM for enterprise software.

Just a well timed deflection by the CRO (Chief Racist Officer) Must be nice to have 2.3B available to push real issues to the back page. The BoD should be immediately dismissed

I mentioned on another thread on how IBM could easily follow the path of Computer Associates. It looks like they are indeed going in that direction...an enterprise software provider that collapses under its own weight and its own problems, only to be bought by a savior of some sort...

IBM: The place where good companies with good products go to be butchered and bled dry.

IBM is just adding revenue, and will probably boost their FCF for next year to whatever.
But internally, it is only complicating things for everybody from an Integration perspective. You have the Red Hat open source stuff, the old IBM integration stack (MQ, ACE, Datapower, APIC, etc...), don't forget the Datastage stuff (old Mercator) which by the way is already used by the Data products to do Integration, and now another set of products (StreamSets, WebMethods) from Software AG to be used with the AI stuff and may be the Data products.

Good thing is that IBM is taking over another competitor... when is IBM going to buy Mulesoft?

I thought IBM executives were concerned about their cash situation to keep Wall Street happy? And this is going to be any all cash overpriced acquisition. Meanwhile PIPs and RAs are still occurring in IBM Software sales and tech sales. I don’t want to hear about any more concerns from Arvind about the cash situation.

WebMethods? 1999 called, it wants its SW company back. Why is IBM buying old tech and claiming it will "bolster its artificial intelligence and hybrid cloud offerings"?

Ibm can only acquire companies now. They can't build/create anything internally anymore. Company will collapse just a matter of time.

Don’t be surprised if Silver Lake and IBM are not done yet. There easily could be a partnership announcement coming. IBM still has several parts of the business that need to be spun off as they don’t fit into the “hybrid cloud/SW modernization” strategy

Well, given the WHOLE company was valued at around USD 2.4B six months ago, to buy a fraction of its products for 2.3B seems bizarre?!