IBM Corp has decided that its Global Services facilities management and systems integration business deserves to become a separate IBM group and is pulling what is billed as a $23bn-a- year operation out of its Sales & Services organization, which now becomes the Sales & Distribution Group, still headed up by IBM senior vice-president Ned Lautenbach. Dennie Welsh, who happened to be in the right place at the right time as general manager of Global Services, is promoted to senior vice-president and will report directly to chairman and chief executive Louis Gerstner. IBM now has five separate groups, with the addition of Global Services. The other four are the Software Group, the Server Group, the Personal Systems Group and Sales & Distribution. It also now has a total of 10 senior vice- presidents. The company plans to hire thousands more employees to fuel growth, with most of them to join Global Services – not too surprising since so many of those facilities management contracts require the winner to take on board most of the customer’s inhouse computer staff as a condition.
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