IBM opens Leicester hub as staff angst grows
Big Blue announces it is creating 300 jobs in UK city as it presses on with global workforce cull
IBM giveth with one hand what the other taketh away as it announced it is planning to create hundreds of jobs in Leicester.
Big Blue said on Friday it will create 300 IT roles at a new services centre in the East Midlands city even as IBM employees from around the world, including in the UK, swapped stories of how they have been affected by the tech juggernaut's latest jobs cull.
A recent report by Forbes rumoured that IBM was gearing up for the biggest corporate restructuring in its history that would see 26 per cent of employees handed a pink slip before the end of February.
Big Blue has since rebuffed the speculation, suggesting that the latest round of casualties would number in the "thousands" and arguing the fact it currently has 15,000 job openings in areas such as cloud, analytics and security is evidence that it "continues to remix its skills to match where we see the best opportunities in the marketplace".
The new Leicester centre will help UK-based businesses "harness the benefits of cloud, big data analytics, mobile, social and security technologies", IBM said.
"This investment in job creation aims to inspire the next-generation workforce from local technical colleges and universities who will deliver the technology skills needed to drive business innovation in the UK," said IBM UK and Ireland chief executive David Stokes (pictured).
The announcement came as angry Big Blue staff continued to flock to IBM employee forum Alliance@IBM to share their experiences of the vendor's latest restructuring drive. One commenter claimed IBM's site in Columbia, Missouri had been "gutted", while another said they had heard that hundreds of jobs had gone from its Boulder, Colorado office alone.
Meanwhile, some commenters were vexed by the revelation within IBM's latest 8-k form that chief executive Ginni Rometty is getting a salary increase of 6.7 per cent to $1.6m (£1m) and a $3.6bn bonus for last year.
The cuts come after IBM registered its 11th consecutive quarterly sales fall as it reorients its business towards high-growth areas such as cloud, security and big data.