Posted on 09/29/2017 8:41:30 AM PDT by RightGeek
But over the last decade, IBM has shifted its center of gravity halfway around the world to India, making it a high-tech example of the globalization trends that the Trump administration has railed against.
Today, the company employs 130,000 people in India — about one-third of its total work force, and more than in any other country. Their work spans the entire gamut of IBM’s businesses, from managing the computing needs of global giants like AT&T and Shell to performing cutting-edge research in fields like visual search, artificial intelligence and computer vision for self-driving cars. One team is even working with the producers of Sesame Street to teach vocabulary to kindergartners in Atlanta.
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The work in India has been vital to keeping down costs at IBM, which has posted 21 consecutive quarters of revenue declines as it has struggled to refashion its main business of supplying tech services to corporations and governments.
The tech industry has been shifting jobs overseas for decades, and other big American companies like Oracle and Dell also employ a majority of their workers outside the United States.
But IBM is unusual because it employs more people in a single foreign country than it does at home. The company’s employment in India has nearly doubled since 2007, even as its work force in the United States has shrunk through waves of layoffs and buyouts. Although IBM refuses to disclose exact numbers, outsiders estimate that it employs well under 100,000 people at its American offices now, down from 130,000 in 2007. Depending on the job, the salaries paid to Indian workers are one-half to one-fifth those paid to Americans, according to data posted by the research firm Glassdoor.
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(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
To be fair, Amazon intelligently operates a tax-free business model, which makes massive amounts of capital available for putting any competitors out of business.
LOL!
To be more precise, that would be non-white. But Indians are dominant, I believe.
It must be very frustrating for someone living in India who calls IBM for tech support and gets someone with an American accent.
Big iron is still around. Big iron got small during the 1990s when the technology went from ECL to CMOS. Years later the CMOS technology improved enough to exceed ECL speed. An IBM parallel sysplex consisting of multiple mainframes tied together via the sysplex coupling system is capable of executing trillions of instructions per second.
Add to that the sheer number of devices that can be attached to the mainframes and you have one very formidable computer system. (last mainframe I supported had 1,024 channels with each channel capable of supporting FF (256) devices. In theory, that mainframe could “talk” to 262,144 devices. No OS server in the world can do that.
I’m not sure how many channels a standalone, fully configged IBM mainframe has. 512? 1,024? 2,028? 4,096?
Last time I checked mainframe and mainframe related peripherals accounted for some 25% of IBM’s hardware sales.
But MF hardware and MF software account for some 45% of IBM’s total sales.
It was back in the 1960s Burroughs “innovated” system virtualization. IBM got onto the bandwagon sometime in the 1970s. IIRC, their version was freeware.
From a support level (which I did for some 37 years) I’ll take a room full of mainframes over broom closet full of OS servers. MFs are almost bullet proof. Rock solid code!!!
Disclaimer. I worked for IBM’s competition, not IBM.
Close to zero.
I know of a very large India-based outsourcing company that is cutting their rates because they can't sustain them.
Of course, many (including myself) would say that quality is a factor in this equation.
This is a good example of what happens when you let accountants run a company. They have no vision for the business, only for “cutting costs”. So they have half their workforce making less than half what they used to make and they are still struggling.
It’s called “circling the drain.”
We were told in our company that upper management needs to stay american because it is an american company.
I still think IBM could have done something significant in the virtualization space when it because big news in the tech rags, because they had a lot of infrastructure in place to do it cleanly and efficiently. Last I had cause to look at IBMs corporate offerings, it seemed to me that what they were essentially selling were big clusters of what was essentially Intel hardware bound together with a custom backplane. That backplane was designed to give a serious speed boost so the various CPUs could work together efficiently.
The problem I saw with that was, yes, you get more throughput across the backplane, but given the speeds that modern chips run and the size of the chips, that chip designers are already running into issues with the speed of light. i.e., it can take more than a clock tick for the signal to cross the chip. Ultimately, processor speed is going to be restrained by the speed of light, which is a fixed quantity that can't be worked around easily. We're already seeing the need to design chips in three dimensions rather than just two for exactly that reason. So, when you're talking about the distances inerrant with connecting multiple CPUs across even a blazing fast backplane, you're still going to see huge amounts of latency that essentially wastes the power of the processors you have available.
“Microsoft is an Indian company.”
It shows. Terrible and stupid designs with buggy implementations followed by horrendous customer support.
But then they outsource to some on the world's worst polluters. Why? Lower costs. Why are those costs lower? In part because the foreign countries don't subject them to the same environmental protection standards as they would in the US.
If they really care about the environment and are willing to put their money where their collective mouth is, then what do they have to lose by building and hiring here?
Good one
My first job right out of the USAF was working in R&D for Jack Kilby on dielectric-isolated chips that had one (1) ECL gate per chip! [Made on 3/4" wafers!]. '-)
Later, "big iron" for IBM, Burroughs (ILLIAC-IV), CDC, Cray, et al became good ECL customers...
ECL -- a real "watt-burner"... '-)
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