Grant Gross
Senior Writer

IBM lays off 1,500, mostly in services

news
May 30, 20071 min

They layoffs come as part of the overhaul of the services unit, and IBM says about 20 percent of those laid off will find other jobs in the company

IBM laid off 1,573 employees Wednesday as part of a continuing overhaul of its services unit, the company said.

Most of the layoffs came from IBM’s services unit and most from North America, said Edward Barbini, a company spokesman. The layoffs were part of a restructuring effort the company announced during its first quarter financial results presentation in April.

During the earnings calls, IBM CFO Mark Loughridge said the company needed to address the cost of its services unit in North America. “We said then we were going to do this,” Barbini said.

Based on past layoffs, about 20 percent of those laid off Wednesday will find other jobs at IBM, Barbini said. At the end of 2006, IBM had about 355,000 employees.

According to union leaders, IBM laid off more than 1,300 people from its global services division earlier this month.

Grant Gross

Grant Gross, a senior writer at CIO, is a long-time IT journalist who has focused on AI, enterprise technology, and tech policy. He previously served as Washington, D.C., correspondent and later senior editor at IDG News Service. Earlier in his career, he was managing editor at Linux.com and news editor at tech careers site Techies.com. As a tech policy expert, he has appeared on C-SPAN and the giant NTN24 Spanish-language cable news network. In the distant past, he worked as a reporter and editor at newspapers in Minnesota and the Dakotas. A finalist for Best Range of Work by a Single Author for both the Eddie Awards and the Neal Awards, Grant was recently recognized with an ASBPE Regional Silver award for his article “Agentic AI: Decisive, operational AI arrives in business.”

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