Comment by evanjrowley | Hacker News Reader

Comment by evanjrowley | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Is this true in 2025?

Asking because the biggest IT consulting branch of IBM, Global Technology Services (GTS), was spun off into Kyndryl back in 2021[0]. Same goes for some premier software products (including one I consulted for) back in 2019[1]. Anecdotal evidence suggests the consulting part of IBM was already significantly smaller than in the past.

It's worth noting that IBM may view these AI companies as competitors to it's Watson AI tech[2]. It already existed before the GPU crunch and hyperscaler boom - runs on proprietary IBM hardware.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyndryl

[1] https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/hcl-technologies-to...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Watson

I know people who still work there and are doing consultancy work for clients.

I am a former IBMer myself but my memory is hazy. IIRC there was 2 arms of the consultants - one was the boring day to day stuff, and the other was "innovation services" or something. Maybe the spun out the drudgery GTS and kept the "innovation" service? No idea.

My go-to analysis for these sorts of places is net income per employee. Back in the day, IBM was hovering around $5,000. Today, Kyndryl is still around $5,000 (2025). But the parent company seems to be now at $22,000 (2024). For comparison: Meta is at $800,000, Apple is at $675,000, and Alphabet is at $525,000. And Wal-Mart, the nation's largest private employer, is around $9,250.

Now, probably part of that is just that those other companies hire contractors so their employment figure is lower than reality. But even if you cut the numbers in half, neither side of that spin off is looking amazing.

The part that was spun off was "Infrastructure Services" (from the Wiki article.) Outsourcing and operations, not the business consulting organization that provides high level strategy to coding services.

https://www.ibm.com/consulting

Yes. GTS was infrastructure services and was spun off. What's left is the old GBS - business services and systems implementation services.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com