The cuts could number in the thousands, per one report.
Multiple IBM employees have reported a round of layoffs by the tech giant in the past week, with cuts appearing to target jobs related to SoftLayer, which IBM acquired in 2013, Neudesic, acquired in 2022, and federal government services.
Former employees with experience at those divisions of the Armonk, N.Y.-based company took to LinkedIn to confirm that they were let go from the vendor.
SoftLayer helped form the basis of IBM Cloud. The cuts could number in the thousands with a focus on the U.S. and the “Cloud Classic” division that came from SoftLayer, according to The Register.
The news outlet said a quarter of Cloud Classic staffers might have been cut as well as 10 percent of the separate Cloud group, with IBM employees now expected to work from an office at least three days per week by the end of April.
[RELATED: IBM Wields SoftLayer In Cloud Battle With Amazon Web Services]
IBM Cuts From Neudesic
CRN has reached out to IBM for comment.
It was not immediately clear if this is a continuation of the layoffs IBM conducted late last year. In 2025, the vendor is working to increase the overall percentage of company revenue that comes through the channel, according to CRN’s 2025 Channel Chiefs.
Among the cut employees were:
- An IBM Cloud fabric development generalist with the company for about 12 years and before that with SoftLayer, which IBM bought in 2013
- A site reliability engineer (SRE) with the vendor for about three years
- A security specialist and support architect focused on deliverables for commercial and federal offerings with the vendor about 10 years
- A workforce staffing professional with IBM for about 11 years who cited “recent budget adjustments within the IBM Federal space” as part of their separation
- A level two senior consultant and technical lead with Neudesic for about two years
- A senior technical recruiter with Neudesic for about five years
- A senior consultant with Neudesic for about 10 years
The cuts come as IBM pursues acquisitions to make the tech giant stand out in the AI era, with recently announced purchases including HashiCorp, DataStax and Applications Software Technology (AST).
Earlier this month, IBM disclosed in a regulatory filing that IBM CEO Arvind Krishna received total 2024 compensation of $25.14 million, up about 23 percent year over year. Krishna’s base salary, unchanged since he became CEO in 2020, was $1.5 million. That compensation mostly came from stock awards valued at about $15 million.
IBM’s board gave a variety of reasons for an annual incentive payment of $3.85 million paid to Krishna, including “software revenue grew 9% year-to-year and Consulting revenue grew 1% year-to-year at constant currency” and “continued shift toward higher growth revenue, with ~76% of revenue now in Software and Consulting,” according to the regulatory filing.
IBM isn’t the only technology company making cuts as the world contends with geopolitical uncertainty, mass reductions in the U.S. federal workforce and multiple countries imposing and threatening to impose tariffs on various goods.
Citrix parent Cloud Software Group, HP Inc., Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Salesforce and others have also announced job cuts recently.
