IBM Australia has been recently laid off dozens of employees from its technical support and analytics pre-sales over a few weeks. These cuts have a significant effect on solution client architects who work in software group of IBM, as well as other analysts for remote technical support.
These cuts are a part of a broader reduction in the IBM staff all over the world, which is also known to impact the UK operations of the company. Meanwhile, it will affect the divisions which oversee a few services such as Cognos business intelligence, Netezza data warehouse, and DB2.
In fact, IBM, despite services such as Cognos training, has undergone a couple of rounds of redundancies due to their shrinking revenues over the past few years. In January, the company has reported that it has the first quarterly revenue growth after 20 consecutive quarters of decreasing sales.
In 2016, the headcount of the IBM Australia had increased up to 1000 people, according to their financial filings. And the impact of redundancies at their vendors can be quantified a couple of times. In the fast few years, the company has tried to refocus around artificial intelligence and cloud services under the Watson brand. Currently, Watson services have found a couple of large clients such as NAB-owned UBank, Suncorp, as well as Woodside Energy.
A spokesperson of the IBM Australia said that they are making extensive hires in high-value growth areas such as security, analytics, AI, and cloud. In addition, they have more than 160 professional roles that need to be filled currently to meet their client demands.
According to the company’ latest financial report, IBM Australia has reduced approximately 15 per cent, which is equivalent to nearly 1000 people, from their Australian workforce. This means the number of employees will fell to 5490, down from 6465, with benefit expenses and wages falling 10% to $249.65 million for the year.
In 2017, IBM Australian had reported a $43.09 million termination in the benefits. These numbers are specified in the latest financial reports submitted by the local IBM branch, IBM Australia Ltd. In the United States, the latest quarterly result of IBM shown the revenue of $18.3 billion down by approximately 2 per cent from the first quarter in 2016. Its share fells 5 per cent in response. The software and hardware business has now reported having 20 consecutive phases of decreasing revenue.
In Australia, the company reported a reduction in revenue for the last year to $3.20 billion from $3.52 billion in the previous year. The sales of products and services, including software, reduce 15 per cent to $820.92 million. Its services sales also dropped more than 6 per cent to $2.28 billion. As a result, the profit also fell hard with a 68-percent reduction.