Coming out of forced retirement to ask, has IBM managed to lay off its way to profitability? That seems to be the only consistent strategy this leadership has been able to think of and implement in the past ten years, so I'm really curious if it's working. And something tells me that I already know the answer...
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"...Migrating mainframe apps to cloud-based workloads is my main profit engine in my new gig. Only a matter of time.. "
How does this play out technically?
Curious how z/OS based CICS/DB2/IMS/etc. based workloads get migrated to Linux based cloud platforms... and what the success rate looks like?
About to vaporize Redhat too. Migrating mainframe apps to cloud-based workloads is my main profit engine in my new gig. Only a matter of time..
Well, we did pay Ginni a whole lot of money. And her great claim to fame was — oh you're going to love this — RoadMap 2015. To achieve RM20215, we did two things: first we laid off loads of people at least once a year and second we took a huge amount of free cash to buy back stocks. The combination means that we never invested, using our own people, in things that might be valuable in the future. You know, like cloud. But we did focus like a laser beam on earnings per share. You know, the way a race care driver fixates on engine oil temperature above all else.
Eventually, we realized we were behind so we bought SoftLayer. You won't find much about them now because we just kind of vaporized them. The same way we vaporized Lotus and Tivoli and ... And now our cloud offering is basically doing service bureau stuff on actual scalable clouds. Kind of like many companies made a good living doing service bureau work on IBM mainframes. Good times.
The hilarious part is: it took till the last quarter of 2014 before all the VPs stopped swearing that come hell or high water we were going to achieve RM2015. It turns out that they and Ginni were insane and never really studied math. I understand that they are available for predicting COVID-19 cases now. Your state will have two new cases according to their math. (What kind of number were you looking for, anyway?) Hey! New idea, why don't we get that program that beat all those humans on Jeopardy to do medical analysis?
TL;DR....no profitability continues to allude.
You are absolutely correct.