IBM Corp’s director of RISC system software, Donna Van Fleet, denies that her AIX unit will bear the brunt of the latest RS/6000 lay-offs or that IBM Corp is shifting investment away from AIX. Although she declined to provide any details, Ms Van Fleet says the unit is undergoing a routine set of resource actions following a peak development effort – the symmetric multiprocessing AIX 4.1. She then went on to describe a checklist of AIX work scheduled that she must now find the staff for, such as a bundled voice, video and multimedia ‘human-centric’ environment, greater personal computer client and integrated object support and further scaling beyond eight-way, and 64-bit application enablement for the forthcoming PowerPC 620. If AIX, and indeed OS/2, really are so strategic to IBM, then why is it laying off staff from both at all? Lee Reiswig’s Personal Software Products group has already taken on AIX staff recycled for Distributed Computing Environment development, the latest redundancies notwithstanding.
