Welcome to IBM Employee News and Links

Highlights—August 8, 2015

• Wall Street Journal:

  IBM, Apple’s Rival-Turned-Partner, Plans to Help Other Companies Adopt Mac. Big Blue, set to be the world’s largest corporate user of MacBooks, expands collaboration. By Robert McMillan. Excerpts: International Business Machines Corp. and Apple Inc. used to be bitter rivals, but lately they have been spending quality time together.

  More than 100 IBM employees occupy Apple’s Cupertino, Calif., campus helping build iPhone and iPad apps for IBM customers such as Citigroup Inc., Sprint Corp. and Japan Post Holdings Co.

  Things are looking different inside IBM, too. Once a company of blue suits, Wintel personal computers and BlackBerrys, Big Blue is on track to become the world’s largest corporate user of MacBooks. On Wednesday, the company began to apply lessons it has learned, introducing a service intended to help other companies adopt Macs.

  Employing 380,000 workers, IBM has a unique challenge in competing with nimble Silicon Valley startups in the market for information-technology services, which research firm Gartner Inc. estimates at $981 billion globally. According to IBM Chief Information Officer Jeff Smith, the question facing the company is: “Can we have the innovation of the best, smallest companies and the scale of IBM, and figure out a way to turn culture into a competitive advantage?” ...

  Three years ago IBM banned internal use of Apple’s Siri, the iPhone voice assistant, over worries about data security. Apparently, there were Apple fans in the company; when IBM first offered Macs to its workers in May, 185,000 employees read the internal announcement, Mr. Smith said. “It really hit a nerve with IBMers,” he added.

  Selected reader comments follow:

  • Why doesn't Apple, with five times the market cap and a ton of cash, just buy IBM?
  • ...because nobody in their right mind would take on the boat anchor of IBM. All these guys do is sell off divisions because of margin compression (servers, PCs, cash/retail, etc). And, then, they don't have a plan to replace the lost revenue. You can only buy back so much stock before the truth of zero growth because of zero innovation comes home to roost.
  • The article states that IBM employs 380,000 workers but forgot to mention that 79% of them or 300,200 workers are overseas in places like India. It's fine if they want to do that but let's not pretend that they are even remotely an American company or even interested in doing something that benefits Americans. They are fully invested in the principles of free labor...oops...I mean free trade.
  • Looks to me more a case of grasping the straws through external partnerships, rather than innovating from inside out.
  • Why can't IBM make insanely great products on its own and leave the whole "solutions" business to vendors free to specify the best components - free of conflicts? Is it too late to crank up the creativity and risk appetite that made IBM great - once - the Selectric, the 1401, the 360?
  • Keep in mind that Tim Cook at first spent several very good and productive years with IBM in the PC Company. He still has a lot of friends and colleagues at IBM, even though the PC business has since moved to Lenovo. It is a personal relationship that has been bound to flower into a full business relationship, and that will likely be good for both companies

• The Register:

  IBM and Apple sitting in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g e-n-t-e-r-p-r-i-s-e b-u-y-e-r-s Macs! People like Macs! And people will like us! Yes, us! scream Big Blue execs. By Shaun Nichols. Excerpts: IBM is once again pushing its software-for-suits in tandem with Apple.

  Big Blue said it will sell its enterprise customers Mac desktops and notebooks pre-loaded with its IT management software and services. The bundles are aimed at helping IT departments integrate Macs with their current software platforms.

  Under the new program, dubbed MobileFirst Managed Mobility, businesses can order Macs directly from IBM and have the Apple machines pre-loaded and configured with IBM's enterprise software and management tools. For larger customers, Big Blue will also allow the Macs to be custom configured to run with internal applications and services.

• New York Times:

  IBM Adds Medical Images to Watson, Buying Merge Healthcare for $1 Billion. By Steve Lohr. Excerpts: IBM is adding medical images to the health data its Watson artificial-intelligence can mine to help doctors make diagnoses.

  The big technology company announced on Thursday morning that it was buying Merge Healthcare, a medical-imaging software company, for $1 billion. When IBM set up its Watson health business in April, it began with a couple of smaller medical data acquisitions and industry partnerships with Apple, Johnson & Johnson and Medtronic. Last week, IBM announced a partnership with CVS Health, the large pharmacy chain, to develop data-driven services to help people with chronic ailments like diabetes and heart disease better manage their health. ...

  The company is investing not only money but also some of its corporate reputation on the belief that it can be a technological leader in improving health care, with better outcomes for patients and more efficient spending for providers, insurers and patients.

  In an interview on the “Charlie Rose” program on PBS in April, Virginia M. Rometty, IBM’s chief executive, spoke of the company’s role over the years in supplying technology for big projects, from computerizing census statistics to putting astronauts on the moon.

  “Our moonshot,” Ms. Rometty said, “will be the impact we will have on health care.”

• The Register:

  IBM splashes a BEEELLLLION dollars on med pics biz. Big Blue buys more to feed its IBM Watson health monster. By Kat Hall. Excerpts: IBM is splashing $1bn (£644m) to buy medical image handling and processing biz Merge, part of plans to beef up its Watson Health division unveiled in April. ...

  John Kelly, senior veep at the IBM Research and Solutions Portfolio, said: "Healthcare will be one of IBM’s biggest growth areas over the next 10 years, which is why we are making a major investment to drive industry transformation and to facilitate a higher quality of care."

  IBM has been desperately trying to re-invent itself in an attempt to revive its falling profits, which last month shrank again for the thirteenth consecutive quarter. ...

  Mike Rogers, analyst at Megabuyte, said of the latest deal: "Although the Merge deal – Watson's third such health-related acquisition – was completed at a chunky multiple, it may be worth every penny should IBM realise the potential value of Merge's technology platforms over time."

  A reader comment follows:

  • Meh! So... there's this thing called CAD (Computer Aided Diagnosis) that's been around for *years*.

    For a radiologist, mammography is the toughest film to read. (Yes I know its digital)

    So there's a system that has been around to do image processing to help spot things that a Radiologist might miss.

    Since the number of images in a study, even if it took 3-4 minutes to review an image, the overall time would be less than it took to take the images.

    With respect to an MRI, you have multiple slices and the tech takes a handful of the slices and sends them off to the radiologist to review. Many more images.

    Here, you could use Big Data to do the image processing in parallel.

    Again, its not a stretch and nothing really new.

    The difference is that these images are less complex to read than a mammography so that the need for a CAD system isn't really necessary. So why spend millions of dollars on a cluster and software to review studies that don't need a CAD review in the first place?

    Again it's IBM trying to find a problem for their solution.

• Austin Business Journal:

  A blockbuster deal for North Austin: IBM sells campus near The Domain, more development planned. By Jan Buchholz. Excerpt: Brandywine Realty Trust announced a huge investment in the Austin market — a day after another real estate company announced it also is sinking more big cash into commercial real estate here.

  Brandywine has bought out IBM Corp. at the so-called "Broadmoor" campus at 11501 Burnet Road. It's adjacent to The Domain neighborhood and commercial complex in North Austin and has much more room to grow. Brandywine and its predecessors and IBM had owned the campus in partnership since 1991.

• InformationWeek:

  IBM Locks Up Cloud Processes With Patents. IBM has received 1,200 patents on cloud computing over the last 18 months. Here's a sample of what Big Blue is patenting and why it's a concern. By Charles Babcock. Excerpts: Over the past 18 months, IBM has secured 1,200 patents on cloud computing, including about 400 in the first half of 2015 alone.

  One is about scaling down a virtual machine as its traffic recedes, another deploys sensitive data to a secure server, and a third creates snapshots of virtual machines for rapid recovery in the event of a failed workload.

  These examples don't necessarily bring to mind a sense of blinding brilliance or original innovation, but these cloud operations can be patented. For those who conceive of the cloud as an environment based on public standards with many shared elements, the grant of these patents isn't entirely reassuring.

  IBM, one of the world's largest patent-holders, year after year, and a leading patent acquirer, is busy applying the skills of its stable of patent lawyers in order to gain more cloud patents. ...

  Granted IBM, with its Bluemix developer platform-as-a-service or its Softlayer cloud data centers, might have specific inventions and innovations that IBM wishes to protect. But the nature of IBM's patents cited doesn't appear to be particular to Bluemix, Softlayer, or any other IBM-originated service. ...

  Rather, they appear to be more general-purpose cloud processes or operations that many service providers already use or would implement if left free to do so. IBM's patent library might therefore be used to demand royalty payments from other service providers or, perhaps equally likely, be used to ward off claims made against IBM by aggressive patent-holders among the service providers. ...

  Then there's Patent 9,015,164 for the high availability of virtual servers. "Aspects of the disclosed invention enable a cloud environment to take snapshots of virtual machines, which can then be used for recovery purposes." Really? Snapshotting is patentable in the cloud? It's widely used in many ways in storage systems, including cloud storage systems. Why would IBM be able to get a patent on that? Read "High Availability for Cloud Servers" and perhaps you can explain it to me.

• Glassdoor IBM reviews. Selected reviews follow:

  • “Overall, good experience”

    Former Employee — Consultant in Kingwood, TX. I worked at IBM full-time (more than 3 years). Pros: Quality projects and people in Global Business Services. Cons: PBC process is subjective. If you get one bad review, you're screwed. Advice to Management: Sell GBS while there is value. The consulting business does not fit with the other products that IBM is now promoting.

  • “Stuck in the Middle”

    Current Employee — Storage Consultant.

    Pros: Home office. Remote work allowed, decent 401k program, with the right manager advancement is possible.

    Cons:

    • Required to work from home office, but must pay for all equipment and supplies myself, no reimbursement
    • Lack of Raises — have not had a pay raise in 6 years
    • PBC rating system the pits you against your team mates for the quota allowance of top ratings. (last year average 68 hours per week; brought in $450k of add-on business (I am not a sales person) and received praising letters from all customers. I was rated a 2 because there was only one 2+ available.
    • I have worked for 18 years and every year I see more of our very knowledgeable, top performers, in my opinion, either leave or get a Resource Action (laid off) due to "cost savings" measures.

    Advice to Management: Get rid of the PBC system that pits us against each other and adopt a system that actually rewards all your top performers and promotes collaboration instead of back stabbing

  • “Sales Specialist”

    Former Employee — Sales Specialist in Nairobi (Kenya). I worked at IBM full-time (more than 3 years).

    Pros: Excellent exposure that can catapult one's career. I loved the fact that you worked with people from all over the world. Lots of opportunities for development, training, mentorship programs. Good work ethic, highly structured company.

    Cons: Be prepared for culture shock, too much structure and procedure slows you down.

    Advice to Management: I believe hiring is a way of getting fresh blood into the organisation, with the intention of replacing the older blood someday. Most new hires are frustrated due to lower pay than competition, doubled with the fact that they hardly climb ever into management positions, even after performing. This explains why the organisation is hemorrhaging — only its young blood sadly.

  • “IBM Global Business Services”

    Former Employee — Managing Consultant. I worked at IBM full-time (more than 8 years). Pros: Wide variety of career opportunities and online learning; great benefits. Cons: Individual recognition is not easy to receive; too little focus on client feedback to a project team than on hours billed; experienced, skilled workers with positive client feedback does not seem to be a factor for retaining key resources.

  • “Another big company”

    Current Employee — People Manager in Bratislava (Slovakia). I have been working at IBM full-time. Pros: Pretends to take care of people. You can have a career if you are willing to sacrifice a good part of your real life. Cons: Sucks out all energy you have. Advice to Management: Live your values and do not preach it.

  • “Sinking”

    Current Employee — Anonymous Employee. I have been working at IBM full-time. Pros: Stable. Above average reputation. Lots of opportunities for work. Cons: Sinking ship, quarterly performance continues to dwindle year after year. Lots of office politics/red tape. Advice to Management: Revamp management tactics, focus on getting quality people who know how to manage people and resources.

  • “Great place to hide and collect cash if that's your goal”

    Former Employee — Technical Solutions Manager in Chicago, IL. I worked at IBM full-time (more than a year).

    Pros: Negotiated hotel discounts you can use for personal travel (bring your badge). If all you want to do is follow a bunch of rules and continue to collect great paychecks without really doing much work, this is your place!

    Cons: Obsessing about "checking boxes" on stifling bureaucratic processes and silly administrivia rules cast across all employees in attempts to be more efficient that do anything but. They keep acquiring the smaller and more agile companies I go work for as their source of innovation.

    Advice to Management: You have employees, not children; stop nannying to the point of locking down productivity in attempts to shave an extra few million in travel costs or home office expenses — you might have a few offenders take advantage but in the long run the gains will far outweigh the lost revenues. Getting VP approval to take a client out to a $20 lunch is just stupid when you are trying to sell them $3M of software, especially when you can't reach him on your mobile because the 90-day approval process on international roaming didn't hit your phone on time for the meeting.

  • “Manufacturing is dead.”

    Former Employee — IT Specialist in San Jose, CA . I worked at IBM (less than a year).

    Pros: It's a big company with a diverse culture. There are some very smart interesting people there and it has a great history to be proud of. Depending in which part you work your experience will vary. Nice benefits, perks through IBM club, still has a strong future. The Watson project seems like a very exciting venture.

    Cons: Poor compensation. Many seemingly bad management decisions being made costing the company more money. Over the past 20 years the value IBM places in its employees has seemed to greatly diminish. Lots of jobs sent outside the borders. Hard if not impossible to move within the company. The bureaucracy one needs to navigate to get anything done is counter productive. (This is from a manufacturing perspective. Other parts of the company may be very different.)

    Advice to Management: Stop tossing babies out with the bath water. Have seen a lot of good talent tossed out the door because upper management did not understand the value it had.

  • “Outsourcing”

    Current Employee — Production Control Analyst in Houston, TX. I have been working at IBM (more than 5 years). Pros: Not many for American workers anymore. Cons: Outsourcing basically every quarter. Terrible management!!! Advice to Management: Value American workers.

  • “Great training with low job security”

    Current Employee — Systems Service Representative. I have been working at IBM full-time (more than a year).

    Pros: Great training and experience. Livable wage and decent benefits.

    Cons: Management is out of touch with employees. Too many layoffs and they have been known to force people to move without any relocation assistance. I feel a sense of instability in my position. I've had 3 managers in my first year. Morale is very low among SSRs.

  • “Race to the bottom”

    Former Employee — STSM in Georgetown, TX. I worked at IBM (less than a year). Pros: Steady work. Smart colleagues. Interesting businesses. Good way to gain experience. Cons: Under the past two CEOs IBM focuses on bodies and utilization to maximize profit. They are much less concerned with innovating and making customers successful to maximize revenue. Advice to Management: Focus on top-line growth instead of bottom-line tricks. Listen to what your MBAs tell you and do the opposite.

  • “Project Manager

    ” Former Employee — Project Manager in Houston, TX. I worked at IBM (more than 10 years). Pros: Great folks to work with! Super Opportunities! Management cares about personal/business life balances. Very caring! Cons: Long hours, but doing interesting work. Advice to Management: Keep the focus on Watson! There is a lot of opportunity there! Hang in there! It will get better.

  • “Cheap trumps quality”

    Current Employee — I have been working at IBM full-time (more than 10 years). Pros: Ability to work from home with globally diverse teams. Cons: Frequent layoffs with the majority of operations moving outside the US. Advice to Management: You'd think with 13 quarters of losses in a row that executives would realize the mass layoffs and offshoring strategies aren't turning things around. Cheap does not trump the quality service delivery customers expect from IBM.

  • “Managing consultant”

    Former Employee — Managing Consultant, Project Manager in Istanbul (Turkey). I worked at IBM full-time (more than a year). Pros: Not too much to say positive but it is international company and there is some obligatory benefit opportunities. Cons: Pressure from management level and behaviour unprofessional. career depends on your manager. It was the case in Istanbul office. SAP Leader was not able to understand the SAP but she was managing.

  • “Smarter Workforce”

    Current Employee — Client Partner in London, England (UK). I have been working at IBM full-time (more than 3 years).

    Pros: Big name reputation; Huge vision and ambition; Exciting transformation; Integrity in leading on doing what we say our customers should do (Bring Your Own Device, Social & Mobile Collaboration, Analytics just some examples)

    Cons: Crushing processes; Unrealistic targets; Tactical, month by month and even week by week focus on numbers at expense of strategic planning; A slow-moving behemoth.

    Advice to Management: Set everyone up for success — not failure

  • “Good employment for the long term”

    Current Employee — Product Engineer in Atlanta, GA. I have been working at IBM full-time (more than 8 years). Pros: Benefits, macro-management, teamwork, growth, flexible. Cons: Outdated tech, some areas still micro-manage, out-of-touch management, below standard pay, still believes in office environment instead of leading in telecommuting. Advice to Management: Pay employees the standard pay or above. Upgrade workstations to the latest tech every 3 years, not 4 to 5. Move to the new standard, telecommute macro-managing employees.

  • “The Rise And Fall Of IBM”

    Former Employee — Anonymous Employee in Prescott Valley, AZ. I worked at IBM part-time (more than a year). Pros: All the 'Pros' disappeared from IBM starting back in 2008 when employees were identified at 'Resources'. Cons: IBM is trying to go out of business. Advice to Management: Technical staff are the people who gain the buy-in from customers not sales people.

  • “Like the military — slow to recognize and promote talent”

    Former Employee — Anonymous Employee in Portland, OR Doesn't Recommend Negative Outlook CEO I worked at IBM full-time (more than 5 years).

    Pros: They used to have cutting edge technology and superior people; asset availability and deployment was never a problem for field personnel who needed access to help.

    Cons: Seniority system was clearly in effect; superior performers received minimal salary increases and promotions were few and far between. For an organization whose motto is "Think" those who did any thinking were usually in the minority and frequently ignored.

    Advice to Management: Shed the turf preservation mentality and when possible work together. Understand you are where you are because you were there first, in most cases.

  • “Good First Job”

    Current Employee — Anonymous Employee in Rochester, MN. I have been working at IBM (less than a year). Pros: Great way to start off your career in Finance. They do a great job teaching you the basics and instilling a sense of work ethic. Cons: The downside is that the salary is low, and they will ask you do more and more work with out a pay increase.

  • “GBS Senior Consultant”

    Current Employee - Senior Consultant in New York, NY Recommends Positive Outlook CEO I have been working at IBM full-time (more than a year),

    Pros: Get to work with very smart people who like to work hard. Pay is good relative to other companies in the industry. IBM is a huge brand name that other companies respect when recruiting. Good baseline to begin your career.

    Cons: No real insight into management even within GBS or your practice. Focus is all on bottom line. Seems like each person is just a billable asset to management. No real worry about growing each team member

    Advice to Management: Keep top performers engaged and learning. Does not seem like top performers are appreciated. Everything here is too rigid and too much tape/ paperwork takes place to get where you want to go.

  • “Internship summer 2012”

    Former Employee — Anonymous Employee.

    Pros: Really good place for an internship. It's a first step through the door towards a career. You get to network with other people who are also interns. As an intern you get to peek into the engineer process of a enterprise.

    Cons: The pay is not competitive. Especially when working in Markham areas. A lot of departments feel stagnant. Many of the projects gets outsourced. Not a lot of perks.

    Advice to Management: Make IBM attractive top talents and give competitive pay.

  • “Getting better, but still not perfect”

    Current Employee — Software Engineer in Littleton, MA. I have been working at IBM full-time (more than a year).

    Pros: IBM has a lot of weight behind the name. There are some incredibly smart people who've worked on all sorts of projects. IBM also is really trying to move into software so talented software engineers are kind of the rock stars.

    Cons: As bureaucratic as it gets. Often a lot of annoyances with having to use IBM products and silly approvals for using new technology. Not much energy to really change the way things work, and often long product timelines drain more of that energy.

    Advice to Management: IBM should be looking to get top-line engineers to remake a lot of different things. They are on the right track, but it still seems dated compared to the hot software startups.

  • “IBM Security”

    Current Employee — Senior Security Analyst in Markham, ON (Canada). Pros: Work with good people most of the time. Cons: Too much work and business processes really killing the time it takes to turn thing around for your clients. Advice to Management: Need to balance work with life or start losing good employees
• Alliance for Retired Americans Friday Alert. This week's topics include:
  • GOP Candidates Attack Social Security, Medicare at Primary Debate
  • Democratic Candidates Take Questions from Labor Leaders in Iowa
  • Alliance Members Continue to Celebrate Medicare’s 50th Anniversary, Social Security’s 80th
  • Remembering Bruce Dunton
  • Medicare Turns 50: Leader Pelosi Stands up for Strengthening Medicare and Social Security

  Download a PDF version.