My husband left a good job with Philips in 2016 to join Watson Health. Should we be worried about layoffs this quarter?
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I’m so sorry you’re going through this as a family. Please tell him to start looking now. Maybe he could even “boomerang” to Philips if he left on good terms. Nobody would question his logic in leaving.
Watson has been a farce from the beginning. Remember IBMs core competencies are financial management (e.g. financial engineering) and marketing. If you understand this, it explains their behavior and PR approach, as well as why they are failing. This from a recently retired IBM accounting executive.
YEP Booming.
Explorys. Bought 4/13/15
Phytel. Bought 4/13/15
Merge. Bought 8/6/15
Truven bought 2/18/16
7500 heads moved to Health practice
That’s approx 10% of IBM’s yearly gross revenue spent in Health in less than a year. That’s the definition of Booming. What management did with it is another question.
Booming in 2016? Huh? The only thing that was booming was the marketing machine and overselling the technology.
Rhetorical question I hope? Sounds like he used "Watson Career Advisor" for that move!!!
Agree - nobody should leave a good job for IBM ever. Get what he can and suggest he move on in life to something else. I trust IBM on nothing ever.
Watson was booming back in 2016. Since then, IBM has had a few set backs due to over promising and under delivering. Lately IBM has been downsizing Watson Health due to customers not re-engaging on their current contracts. So getting back to your question should you be worried. The answer is “it depends”. If your husband has a skill that is in demand, and cannot be off shored then he most likely is OK. (NOTE take this with a grain of salt in that IBM has nuked quite a few of their acquired developers as they have decided to farm what they have, and not invest in anything new) If he has a skill that can be off shored then YES you should be worried, and he should be looking elsewhere. NET NET Watson Health was quite hot 2 years ago, but has been cooling off quickly as IBM didn’t want to spend anymore on it.
I don't want to alarm you, but unfortunately yes you should be worried. IBM is in the process of down/right-sizing so that he can start selling some of its businesses to pay for the Red Hat acquisition.