Big Blue’s global restructuring will impact Canada. As CDN has just learned that approximately 200 workers at the former IBM/Cognos facility where given their walking papers on Thursday.
IBM did confirm layoffs were forthcoming earlier this week. The company did not provide any details but it’s expected that it will affect no less than 6,000 workers around the world, based on the $1 billion cost figure CEO Virginia Rometty wanted to save earlier this year. If so it would only dent IBM’s total workforce of more than 434,000 people by just two per cent.
According to an IBM employee group named Alliance@IBM, the layoffs notices have passed 2,000. The biggest area that was cut was in Software Group Marketing where more than 200 people lost their jobs this week. The least impacted area was BT/IT CIO Enterprise Transformation where only four people were let go.
Alliance@IBM/CWA Local 1701 said it’s an IBM employee organization that is dedicated to preserving and improving rights and benefits at IBM. The group is based in Johnson City, N.Y.
The last time IBM made these sever cuts globally and to Canada was back in 2009, when it axed 16,000 workers.
This round of layoffs comes on the heels of IBM announced new initiatives to further support and speed up the adoption of the Linux operating system across the enterprise. These include two new Power Systems Linux Centers and plans to extend support for Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) technology to its Power Systems portfolio of server products.
And, Big Blue also made enhancements across its systems portfolio that is designed to help organizations adopt cloud computing as they build toward Software Defined Environments (SDE).
Enhancements to IBM’s Smarter Storage line of Flash, disk and tape systems give clients faster access to business critical information and Big Data insights. New High Performance Computing solutions bring HPC capabilities to mainstream servers to help more clients crunch their ever-mounting volumes of data faster.