The vendor, mired in a 10-quarter streak of declining revenue, most recently posting a 4 percent sales tumble in its Q3 2014 along with a 17% downturn in GAAP net income, will undertake a global restructuring to create new business units for Research, Sales and Delivery, Systems, Global Technology Services, Cloud, Watson, Security, Commerce and Analytics, according to a report in the UK’s Register.
Mobility will serve as an overlay in some of the new groups, while IBM’s Business Partner unit is expected to house both the hardware and software channel teams, the report said.
A number of IBM senior managers already have been informed of the organisational changes coming down the pike, the Register reported.
New ways of conducting business prompted by the cloud are said to have convinced chief executive Ginni Rometty that IBM’s existing structure no longer serves the vendor.
“Longer term, IBM has to be a business that makes sense in the new era [of computing consumption] and be easier to work with,” a Register source said.
At this point, it’s unclear if the makeover will lead to job cuts, although the Register said its sources indicated redundancies could result in thousands of layoffs. In January, 2014, IBM initiated a $1bn “workforce rebalancing” in which it laid off some 15,000 workers worldwide, and as recently as last October, Rometty hinted more layoffs might be coming as the company restructures around the cloud, analytics and security.
