At IBM, which has embraced remote work for decades, a relatively large proportion of employees work outside of central hubs. By early February, when Peluso made her announcement, it was not uncommon for every member of a small team in her department to dial into conference calls from a different location. IBM declined to comment on how many employees would be impacted by the co-location announcement.
Some workers furiously began looking for new jobs. A theory among some employees is that IBM is using co-location as a downsizing effort. IBM has had many layoffs during a transformation attempt that has involved 19 consecutive quarters of declining sales, but executives say the colocation effort aims to achieve something more difficult: a complete revamp of how the company—which has a workforce the size of Cleveland—quite literally, works.
Some of these teams have worked together in offices from the start, while other departments, like marketing, called employees together from distributed locations. Though not every department at IBM will be colocated, many will. One employee who had been asked by IBM to work from home decades ago while the company had been busy cutting down on expensive office space said he was surprised to recently receive a mandate to come into the office.
Why change the policy now? Remote work, at this point, has become mainstream. Email, chat apps like Slack, and video-conferencing have moved to the cloud, which makes it easy for remote workers to stay in touch. Research suggests remote workers are more productive and log more hours than employees who work in the office, and for many companies, offering an option to work remotely helps recruit employees who are seeking better work-life balance or who want to live in a location where the company has no office.
But IBM needs more than better productivity right now. IBM has been keeping its profitability afloat by unloading offerings with relatively low profit margins and aggressively cutting costs. At least according to the public markets, hope is on the horizon. But IBM is still very much in the process of turning these new technologies into profitable businesses.
The company is a ship that is changing direction, not one that merely needs more horsepower. Team proximity appears to help foster better new ideas. One Harvard study found that researchers who worked in close physical proximity produced more impactful papers.
Another report used data from badges that collect data on employee interaction to argue that employees who have more chance encounters and unplanned interaction perform better.
It surprises some people to hear, but IBM still makes computers. They also make minicomputers and mainframes. Nobody talks about mainframes and mincomputers much anymore, except about how nice it would be to get rid of them. In my day job as a computer security professional, I get questions about protecting IBM mainframes and minicomputers fairly often.
The modern IBM mainframe has been around for 50 years. The first of these projects led to a notorious—and long-running— lawsuit from SCO , a fading proprietary Unix vendor, in IBM has done rather well both supporting and competing with Linux. IBM has a significant sales and service arm. One large company I used to sell security software to did exactly that. Unisys is a great example. IBM also competes with Amazon and Microsoft with a cloud hosting architecture. That eventually became a technology it calls Watson, introduced in The segment is aimed at helping clients to build AI-enabled intelligent workflows and modernize application suites that are optimized for hybrid cloud environments.
Revenue fell 3. Pre-tax income declined The Global Technology Services segment offers comprehensive IT infrastructure and platform services, including a set of hybrid cloud services and solutions.
Revenue for the segment fell 5. The Systems segment provides infrastructure platforms to help meet the new requirements of hybrid multi-cloud and enterprise AI workloads. It also designs advanced semiconductor and systems technology. Revenue for the segment fell 8. The segment posted a The Global Financing segment is engaged in financing, remanufacturing, and remarketing.
Financing is conducted through IBM Credit, which provides financing to customers. Remanufacturing and remarketing consist of the sale or lease of refurbished or upgraded equipment. Revenue for the segment fell A note to readers that the segment breakdowns above and in the pie charts exclude IBM's "Other" segment, which includes a small amount of revenue from divested businesses and other sources.
IBM is considering selling its Watson Health business, a person with knowledge of the matter told Bloomberg. IBM is exploring different alternatives, such as a sale to a private equity firm or a merger with a blank-check company.
However, it is still early in the deliberations and the company decided not to pursue a deal, said the person who asked not to be identified.
IBM made a number of acquisitions late last year, including: an agreement to acquire Nordcloud, a European leader in cloud implementation, application transformation, and managed services Dec. IBM announced in the first half of October that it was going to separate its Managed Infrastructure Services unit of its Global Technology Services segment into a new public company. IBM said that the spinoff , which is expected to be completed by the end of , will allow for the company to focus its attention on its open hybrid cloud platform and AI capabilities.
The newly-formed company will also have more flexibility to focus on modernizing the infrastructure of global organizations.
As part of our effort to improve the awareness of the importance of diversity in companies , we offer investors a glimpse into the transparency of IBM and its commitment to diversity, inclusiveness, and social responsibility. We examined the data IBM releases to show you how it reports the diversity of its board and workforce to help readers make educated purchasing and investing decisions.
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