Thread regarding IBM layoffs

Don’t bet on it The wheels are already spinning

looks like nothing is changing this year ya'll lol

Thank you @8ipb+18zWezS8 for sharing the thoughts. OP here.

I must agree with your comments around financial engineering. There are only a few Net New and New Logo wins in recent time, and those wins are not enough to cover the organic churns and the revenue losses caused by ELA signing deals (as you said) . I once suspected the commission structure might be the root cause of this continuous revenue decline and actually given IBM my feedback few years ago that we need to reset the commission structure based on Net New Revenue. But nothing happened... Then one must wonder, who are benefiting from the current structure? 1) Sellers, only if they close a mega deal, 2) It must be lucrative to leadership team. Since sales people are not part of decision making for the commission structure, that only leaves the leadership team who is refusing to change it. Similar to your earlier post about them refusing to really transform the lisencing model, I've concluded these decisions were deliberately made by the leadership.

Regarding the leadership being shuffled around cross BUs, many IBMers talk as if this is a good thing having the opportunity to play in different roles, but as you mentioned, this actually often cause them to lose the specialty insights and making them more and more generalists who are out-of-touch. I'm a huge advocate for learning and those leadership folks can learn new areas if they are willing learners, but it takes time and by the time they learn a little, they change around again. Besides, we now don't have a luxury of time to wait for them to learn for several years. If it wasn't working out for a leadership in one BU, IBM need to make a tough decision and let them go rather than tossing them around. Decades of loyalty alone is not going to salvage IBM at this stage.

I've seen few external execs coming in but not nearly as much as Directors and VPs being shuffled around. I too agree we need some outside perspectives, but more than that, I believe we need to caltivate the culture promoting the right talent within the specialty area. There are still very sharp people in IBM who actually care about the company but IBM HR thinks Your Career and Checkpoint tools are sufficient to identify the right candidates when in reality those tools still heavily rely on out-of-touch managers subjective views.

This is the OP that was quoted.

In response to comments about a few mega deals this year..let me guess, were they financially engineered deals via an ELA or similar? Or can you tell me that you sold a net new mega deal? Not an upgrade from something, not an expansion, not increasing some legacy product...like a NET NEW deal for a software product invented in the last 5 years that the client doesn’t already own? That maybe you competed against another product and won?

It’s certainly not impossible but I’d be surprised. In my experience every large deal at ibm is financially engineered...i.e. working new products into long term enterprise agreements by discounting S&S or other costs. My sales people out there know what I mean. For others, they basically find creative ways to add “new content” to a large client’s annual/3-year renewal because it’s better for the sales people and for ibm revenue to report new “growth”. Consider for a moment, there are software products and companies out there taking the world by storm and landing tens of millions of $$$ in brand new business at each client.

To the poster, thanks for highlighting my post. I agree about leadership FOR SURE. Another leadership problem as I see it is that everyone from director and above is a longtime ibmer. So BU’s will get a new leader (like you say) from some other area of the company but it’s never someone from the outside. IBM is crazy insular and political and execs who’ve worked there for 5,10,20,30 years just move around leadership roles. Meanwhile that means they lose perspective completely on the competitive landscape. And the same ideas/culture is perpetuated to no end....in my 5.5 years there I never once saw an external exec come in.

Interested in your take

This -> "Our sales people are shuffled"

At a time when we needed our most loyal customers the most (during a transition), we shuffle all our salespeople (engineers included). Just who were our customers supposed to be loyal to?

Our customers hated it; It's no wonder they are leaving as soon as each product's technical debt comes due.

software, I'd say nothing made them special...just like sales happen so randomly customers decided to cut PO's on those dates lol

Which disciplines closed mega deals in June and October? And what made those months special?

It’s been a tough year in sales for sure but a few of us closed mega deals in October and June. Still being fed well just hard to find those little deals throughout the year

This. Thank you for putting the truth out there.