After the RedHat acquisition, I’m in a lot of stress, as I know that many changes will come in the company structure. That need for change is, in this case, mixed with the ever-present need to cut costs, which is higher than ever, given the amount of money the company needed to put into the acquisition. Any idea what IBM employees could fir fall victim to this situation? Folks at certain locations, a certain profile of employees, people that have a higher pay?
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Those who are thinking that IBM middleware which mostly is WAS, MQ, IIB, API CONNECT and a few others will go away just do not understand that these products are highly successful and profitable. As a matter of facts they bring in 3+ Billion a year which is equal to Red Hat’s entire revenue! Sure RH has its own app server, messaging server, etc... those are just peanuts.
Now, there is no doubt that ICP will go away at some point and OpenShift will replace it but knowing IBM, they will milk ICP as long as they can trying to convince customers that they need both ICP and OpenShift. As a matter of fact ICP is already supported on OpenShift, makes no sense whatsoever to run a Kube implementation over another one, but IBM will certainly tell you otherwise.
1ozz. Now you are starting to catch on to the grand plan. Redhat will make a lot of current product positions redundant (AIX, middleware, etc etc). Now ask yourself how many folks work in those positions? Answer = not very many, as they have already been purged (AIX used to be a 4-5 billion dollar business, and today it’s 500 million. NOTE IBM has already downsized that division). So where will IBM harvest the heads as they are definitely running to a revenue to headcount number. Answer = services. There is a reason IBM reissued the GTS Naming convention vs TS&C. They plan to downsize it substantially. That’s where the non-strategic heads are and that’s where they will be harvested. You could easily see all of GTS disappear. 1/3 will move into GBS, and Cognitive/cloud, 5-10% will move into HW (enterprise boxes only) and the remainder will be downsized and then spun. Ask yourself why does IBM want to play in TSS for scale out boxes when they don’t make any money after IBM’s burden rate is applied. The same question applies to outsourcing (your mess for less). Does GTS has essential pieces. Absolutely, but the other IBM divisions will absorb them along with Redhat. If you work in IGF, Storage, or scale out legacy power, you are most likely going to see the ax fall. Why. You have become a commodity, and IBM doesn’t play well in commodity spaces
Anyone who current works on a competing product in any role. Websphere, AIX, ICP, are all going to be on life support.
We can only hope that most of hr, finance, and the rest of the people doing useless work (like journey to cloud, career model, etc) will follow too.
Hang on to your bootstraps. There has to be lots of change/layoffs give the amount of debt taken on and the shift to a primarily cloud company. The GTS, hardware and legacy software groups are screwed.