Company has said it’s restructuring workforce to retool for cloud services
and data analysis
By Robert McMillan May 20, 2016 6:51 p.m. ET
International Business Machines Corp. this week?quietly laid off
employees, continuing a wave of job cuts the company announced in April.
IBM declined to say how many jobs would be cut overall. The total layoffs
could affect more than 14,000 jobs, according to an estimate by Stanford
Bernstein analyst Toni Sacconaghi.
The job cuts come after four straight years of declining revenues as the
rise of cloud computing threatens its software and services business. IBM has
said it would restructure its workforce to retool for cloud services and data
analysis, and could hire an equal number of new employees by the end of the
year.
The company said on Friday it had more than 20,000 open positions. Two
employees reached?Friday?said that IBM’s internal job-search tool
listed between 7,000 and 8,000 open positions.
IBM’s last round of layoffs, which affected less than 5,000 employees, came
in March.
“Their initiatives aren’t going as fast as they’d like them to and it’s
affecting their revenue more than they thought,” said one IBM employee affected
by this week’s layoffs who requested anonymity because the employee is still
with the company.
This week’s cuts affected workers in the Research Triangle of North Carolina;
New York City; Poughkeepsie, N.Y.; and Boulder, Colo. Some positions are being
moved to places like India and Costa Rica, according to workers affected by
this week’s cuts.
Earlier in the week, IBM said it would , N.Y., campus and move those jobs to a facility in North
Castle, New York.
The company’s total workforce was 377,757 at the end of 2015.
