Layoffs at IBM, Novell

IBM is laying off half of its massive Global Services group, according to Cringley. The RIF starts with 1,300, and is expected to hit as many as 150,000 employees. (!!!)

The IBM project I am writing about is called LEAN and the first manifestation of LEAN was this week’s 1,300 layoffs at Global Services, which generated almost no press. Thirteen hundred layoffs from a company with more than 350,000 workers is nothing, so the yawning press reaction is not unexpected. But this week’s “job action,” as they refer to it inside IBM management, was as much as anything a rehearsal for what I understand are another 100,000+ layoffs to follow, each dribbled out until some reporter (that would be me) notices the growing trend, then dumped en masse when the jig is up, but no later than the end of this year.

If true, this is shocking and hugely unpleasant news. No matter what you think about this or that company (and I think highly of IBM), real people are losing their jobs in the LEAN layoffs.

Cringley says that the layoffs are a result of underbid, unprofitable services. If so, this is a reflection of the increasingly competitive price wars going on in enterprise software (and associated services). Survival of the leanest (seriously, no pun intended on that).

At the same time, I’ve heard from several friends at Novell that a quiet restructuring is happening there. Developer Services and the NetWare groups have reportedly been hit hardest, but I also know much of the Linux Impact Team has volunteered to take severance and look for greener pastures. Many of these left Novell on April 30. (I’ve been talking with a range of them – if you want to hire a LIT person, let me know. Many of these people are fantastic.)