8 ms·

A friend of mine was an employee at a technology support company that supported Walmart's servers, registers, and probably more that I was not aware of. That co

A friend of mine was an employee at a technology support company that supported Walmart's servers, registers, and probably more that I was not aware of. That company recently lost it's contract to IBM. They offered many of the employees contracts at IBM, but the general feeling was that many of them are just there until they finish training their overseas replacements. I tried to find a source to backup this info, but did not find anything. My only source is a reference check from IBM for one of the employees. I'm not sure how much of an impact a contract of this size has on IBM's value, but it indicates to me that their competitors are a contract renewal away from being absorbed by IBM.

sumoboy 9y ago
Pretty common practice at IBM to get an account, migrate all the people over and then transition them to india, brazil, and mexico at dirt cheap rates. Only 1/10 of converted employees will be left after 2 years. Watson is trying to force a solution to a typically unknown problem and not the reverse. Projects like this always fail. IBM has failed to make a cloud presence with there own products. Buffet's own investing rules is to understand the product, so maybe he's finally coming to his senses even IBM doesn't understand it's own products and the market demand.
- dudus 9y ago
  Can confirm. I'm Brazilian and my first job out of college was for IBM supporting a US company systems. I was not even an employee of IBM, I was officially a contractor serving IBM serving a US company. Engineering was all in India and support in Brazil because we had timezone overlap and better English accent. It's a solid business plan if you ask me. There's a lot of money to be made on outsourcing operations that don't need to be in the US.
justin66 9y ago
You're talking about NCR, right? That's interesting, since their stock isn't exactly hurting.
- deckar01 9y ago
  No. NCR probably supports the new self checkout hardware. This company supported the Windows infrastructure. AFAIK most of the registers are old and still run Windows.
  - justin66 9y ago
    Ah. At one time NCR supported all their in-store registers and PC-based servers, but my knowledge is very out-of-date.
drawkbox 9y ago
IBM is running on the fumes of their brand. If IBM was not named IBM they'd be perceived as just another Infosys. IBM hasn't been developer friendly for a long, long time.

sumoboy 9y ago

Pretty common practice at IBM to get an account, migrate all the people over and then transition them to india, brazil, and mexico at dirt cheap rates. Only 1/10 of converted employees will be left after 2 years. Watson is trying to force a solution to a typically unknown problem and not the reverse. Projects like this always fail. IBM has failed to make a cloud presence with there own products. Buffet's own investing rules is to understand the product, so maybe he's finally coming to his senses even IBM doesn't understand it's own products and the market demand.

dudus 9y ago
Can confirm. I'm Brazilian and my first job out of college was for IBM supporting a US company systems. I was not even an employee of IBM, I was officially a contractor serving IBM serving a US company. Engineering was all in India and support in Brazil because we had timezone overlap and better English accent. It's a solid business plan if you ask me. There's a lot of money to be made on outsourcing operations that don't need to be in the US.

justin66 9y ago

You're talking about NCR, right? That's interesting, since their stock isn't exactly hurting.

deckar01 9y ago
No. NCR probably supports the new self checkout hardware. This company supported the Windows infrastructure. AFAIK most of the registers are old and still run Windows.
- justin66 9y ago
  Ah. At one time NCR supported all their in-store registers and PC-based servers, but my knowledge is very out-of-date.

drawkbox 9y ago

IBM is running on the fumes of their brand. If IBM was not named IBM they'd be perceived as just another Infosys. IBM hasn't been developer friendly for a long, long time.