IBM and HCL partnership: a positive change for IBM Workload Scheduler people

After 18 years spent working for IBM, mainly on Workload Scheduler covering different roles, the time to leave and move to a different company has come.
On September 1st I've started working for a new company, HCL Technologies, a global IT services company with 100.000+ employees, but I'm not leaving IBM Workload Scheduler development.

This change is part of a 15+ years strategic partnership between HCL and IBM to invest together in IBM Workload Scheduler.

In this article I'll try to represent my personal view of this partnership and why I think this is a positive change for the product and all the people working with it.

All the information in this article are my own opinions that must not be consider coming from either IBM or HCL.

For an official statement from IBM and HCL about the partnership  you can look at the following posts on the HCL and IBM web sites.


In the last months I had some time to figure out how this partnership will work, and as said in the title, I personally think this partnership is positive for the Customers and for the IBM Employees transferred to HCL.

For why IBM and HCL are doing this partnership you can refer to their official statements.

OK, but what "strategic partnership" practically means? In few words IBM and HCL had decided to invest together on IBM Workload Automation product family and other software products, and to invest overall more then in the last years. IBM will focus on sales and marketing the products, while HCL will handle development, support (L2 and L3) and lab services. Offering management is a joint responsibility.

A win for customers

This is the most important win and the basis for the other wins, neither IBM, HCL or the employees may think to have a return without assuring customers satisfaction first.

The main element for customers is that they will see any disruptive change on IBM Workload Scheduler (or Automation):

• the product is still branded IBM as before
• it's sold by IBM as before
• existing contracts with IBM are still in place with IBM
• support is provided as usual via IBM channels (PMRs)
• AVP contracts are still valid
• the development, L2, L3, offering management teams are the same that you know (even if now most of them are in HCL)
• current roadmap is confirmed and we are working to define the roadmap for the next 5 years.

On the other side I don't think that all will be exactly the same. This transition provides more focus and investments on IBM Workload Scheduler, I think it's fare to expect that this will produce an acceleration in providing new features and better services.

Currently the main HCL business in on IT and development services, this strength may be used to provide a more consistent service offering on IBM Workload Scheduler, allowing customers to have more immediate returns on their investments on the product.

A win for Employee

After the hard emotional times following the announce of the transition, once the team has actually transitioned to the brand new HCL site in Rome, we actually discovered that there is no significant change on the work we do, the value that we can provide to our customers and in the end it's better to work for a company that base its strategy on your work then stay with a company that is moving its focus on different areas.

This transition will also increase the resources available for product development, adding HCL technologies and expertise to the IBM ones that we will continue to leverage.

Conclusions

In the end, this is a change that is coming unexpected to both customers and employees, but there are all the elements for a successful future for the whole TWS community.

Just one small change to care about: it was not possible to setup an automatic redirection of e-mails from our old e-mails to the new ones in HCL, if you had e-mail contacts with employees transferred to HCL, consider that you will need to replace them with the new @hcl.com e-mail addresses.

If you have any doubt about this session, feel free to contact me via comments, email or social networks, we will be happy to setup a call to discuss more in details this transition. Get in touch with me also if you are struggling contacting any transferred employee.

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