#acquisition

Its official!! Infosys is coming to take over the projects in CSO org. God only knows how secure ATT data will be after that. So, employees are supposed to train them only to be told bye bye in 4-6 months!! These id--ts at the top never learn from the past and what is happening in India right now... India just bashed up Meta top leadership citing a small technical glitch only to suppress freedom of speech and forcing them to block insta accoutns of a number of people who are protesting against the government!! Yet Stinky wants to send work to India and Indian companies...stinky will eventually realize how d-mb it was to move work to offshore and foreign companies but not before making a costly mistake just all other billion dollars mistakes he did in the past.

to tell the truth when lowell mcadam's made all these bad aqusitions and cause a incredible amt of debt to this company,you know what im talking about,the arrogance of the wireless side of the company,nickel and diming the customers for 30 years.lowell pitting non-union against union workers,do you really think that you can come back from all that B.S also you think that most of the employees in verizon give two craps anymore,maybe at one time most did,but i dont think so anymore.most people here are just making end meat in these times .so you think hip hip horray go Vteam means anything,wake up and smell the coffee

European food group Vandemoortele has fully acquired Banneton Bakery Inc., a South Jersey-based manufacturer of artisan pastries. This acquisition follows an 80% stake Vandemoortele took two years ago, establishing its first U.S. production platform. The Swedesboro facility will remain operational with no planned layoffs, and the company intends to invest further in the plant and its workforce. Banneton's brand will continue as part of Vandemoortele's North American portfolio, complementing their European product offerings. This move aims to strengthen Vandemoortele's presence in the premium frozen baked goods market.

Swedesboro, New Jersey

https://njbiz.com/vandemoortele-acquires-banneton-bakery-south-jersey/

Which is the best (or worst) outcome here: (1) Insight is acquired by a Capgemini, NTT Data, Computacenter, Infosys, or Accenture - say its for their client footprint, onshore presence, vendor logistics, or whatever - or (2) PE steps in. Perhaps its Thoma Bravo, Francisco Partners, KKR, Apollo, etc - for the sake of executing a restructuring and margin optimization buy-and-build strategy without the public stock scrutiny - or (3) things remain the same. The same old same old same old same old Q-after-Q paper cut plan. What is the better option? 1, 2, or 3??? The wide range M&A Premium would place an implied price between $160 to $185/share. Enterprise market cap value minus net debt (~$1.3B) leaves decent forward P/E earnings power. What would you like to see happen? Which would be worse - what might be better?

Don’t get me wrong. I retired from IBM and I loved my career there. I have fond memories of IBM, but I am very concerned as I watch competitors like Microsoft or AWS. While IBMs competitors enjoy double digit sales growth, IBMs sales growth has been in the single digits. Can a company grow that depends heavily on acquisitions for sales growth rather than organically growing from its own products that it invents/creates/sells/supports. How long will the board members and major shareholders accept status quo before they start looking at takeover bids from other corporations?

The vertical farming company 80 Acres Farms has implemented layoffs. This action follows the failure of a potential acquisition deal. The company was unable to secure additional capital. The acquisition fell through on August 2. These layoffs are a direct consequence of this financial setback.

Hamilton, Ohio

https://www.bizjournals.com/cincinnati/news/2026/08/05/80-acres-closure-layoffs-acquirer-indoor-farm.html

For Gods sake please leave John. Nothing you will do will brighten AT&T’s future. The damage you are doing will lead to the company being bought out. Your ego has you frozen in place. You are the reason not the employees that the company is going nowhere. Your leadership is the worst I have ever witnessed. Take your shiny slick dome and ride off into the sunset forever!

A bankrupt Eastern Kentucky coal operator has been sold at auction. Clintwood JOD LLC owed over $60 million in debt. The company was purchased for $1.1 million by CW Reclaim LLC. This sale follows earlier layoffs in March. Additional job cuts were reportedly announced Friday.

https://www.kentucky.com/news/state/kentucky/article316726236.html

Not sure if that’s good or bad but they seem like they are gone.

I must say.. initially I thought Dan did not have a strategy. But when Board member said he didn't want to get ahead of Dan on strategy it's now obvious.

Dan's strategy is to rebalance expenses and eliminate Han's DEI stink.

How? Appoint Consumer President and Consultants outside of legacy Inept Vz Execs to reset Verizon for aquisition.

There is zero operational/marketing strategies for growrh on purpose.

Buckle up!

So what's all this I hear about Fidelis Care being phased out/lost/whatever it's called? I used to live in NY and was a Fidelis team member from 2016-2022, so before and after the Centene acquisition. Is the entire health plan going? Just certain departments? Whatever the case, it's going to have massive downstream effects. They're one of the largest MCOs in NY, if not the largest.

Centene started with layoffs in 2021 after acquiring WellCare, due to promising most of WellCare employees to keep there jobs. When Centene decided to rebrand their Medicare product (AllWell) to WellCare a decline started. After acquiring WellCare, members talked to people all over the USA, not just in the state they lived, this also caused a decline on membership. Cut the fat at the top, let the company go back to the way it was ( talk to people in your state that know your state and resources). Centene was a great company to work for until 2021, acquiring WellCare.
These are my thoughts and observations!

Hey, we have a new president Paul T – who has a background as an asset manager. Must be here to replace Rawool?, In the failing DXC, do we think he is here to prepare a turnaround, sale, refinancing, or orderly wind-down?

Here comes more bloat and more LRs at CISCO

Ignore the 25% loss in market value of the company. Look over here at this shiny bauble.

https://www.wsj.com/cio-journal/ibm-claims-new-era-of-quantum-advantage-92e3d5d4

Big Blue is racing to show that its quantum computing business can be profitable following a historic stock tumble

By: Belle Lin | July 30, 2026 6:00 am ET

International Business Machines said Thursday its research shows “quantum advantage”—a point at which quantum computers perform computations beyond conventional ones—and that these results can be rigorously validated.

The findings, which mark a step toward practical application of the nascent technology, were published in a trio of papers by IBM and its research partners. These include the University of Chicago, Japan’s RIKEN national research institute, and the quantum computing software firms Qedma, BlueQubit and Algorithmiq.

“We’re in the quantum advantage era,” said Jay Gambetta, director of IBM Research. “Scientists can trust it. Now it’s moving from people benchmarking the systems to using these for science to look at applications.”

The news comes as Big Blue races to show that its quantum computing business can be profitable.

Earlier this month, the company suffered its biggest share drop in history after it issued a profit warning citing a shift in customer spending from software to AI hardware and memory chips. IBM said the performance of its software and infrastructure business fell short of expectations in the second quarter.

Since then, IBM Chief Executive Arvind Krishna has offered an optimistic take on the company’s future, arguing quantum computing will begin to power its growth in a matter of years. The company’s first-mover advantage in quantum could boost its fortunes the way being a first mover in GPUs did for Nvidia, he recently told The Wall Street Journal.

IBM is going up against tech giants like Microsoft and Google, but also a host of startups in the quantum space.

While IBM is hardly the first to claim quantum advantage—the quantum computing company D-Wave made the claim last year, and Google said it showed “verifiable quantum advantage” in October—Gambetta said IBM’s latest papers are notable for demonstrating that its results are provable.

“They have methods that make sure that what is running on the quantum computer is giving you correct results,” he said.

In the Qedma and IBM paper, for instance, the companies said they showed how quantum computers can be used to explore the physics of materials, and that the results were confirmed using various methods, including on a Quantinuum quantum computer. “Think of this as a new physics that is being demonstrated on a quantum computer where classical methods fail,” Gambetta said.

Unlike traditional computers, where outputs can be validated by running the same problem on other computers, some quantum computer outputs push beyond the limits of what classical computers can verify.

That’s partly why IBM’s latest announcement is significant: The ability to replicate a quantum computer’s results shows that the systems are becoming more reliable and consistent, according to Heather West, an analyst focused on quantum computing at research firm International Data Corp.

Thursday’s news also helps put IBM further along the path to a fault-tolerant quantum computer, a milestone it has promised to achieve by 2029.

For businesses, though, the most significant takeaway is whether practical applications—from solving optimization problems to making breakthroughs in areas like materials science and medicine—will be possible with quantum computers.

Gambetta says IBM’s latest findings are a step in that direction.

“Having a trusted foundation allows you to start to do the application research, and as we inject more capable machines, it will allow us to scale those applications to ones that matter for business,” he said.

IDC’s West described IBM’s results as “another milestone in the way towards being able to use quantum systems to solve complex problems that are beyond the limits of classical compute,” and help solidify the company’s position as a strong player in the quantum market.

But reaching quantum advantage won’t be a singular moment—and certainly not in the way that the release of ChatGPT set off the artificial-intelligence bo-m, West said.

“We’re going to see future announcements that build on top of these,” she added. “Maybe in a month from now, or six months or a year, these particular findings will be overcome by findings that are a little bit more advanced, and that’s the way it should be.”

IBM said it encourages debate over quantum advantage, and Gambetta said he anticipates scientists will come up with newer classical methods and compare them against IBM’s findings. “I’m not going to say they’re bulletproof,” he said.

“What has changed is that we’re in a point where we can get trusted outcomes so that scientific debate can happen,” he added. “Over the next couple years, it will predominantly be a scientific debate, exactly like AI was debated in the universities using GPUs to look at neural networks.”

Next quarter should be interesting when that nonsense rolls away.

Public Storage, a major self-storage company, has announced layoffs affecting 107 employees in Greenwood Village, Colorado. These job cuts follow Public Storage's recent $10.5 billion acquisition of National Storage Affiliates Trust. The affected positions include corporate roles and several leadership roles within the acquired company. Public Storage stated that impacted employees will receive at least sixty days' compensation. The layoffs are scheduled to occur over the next year.

Greenwood Village, Colorado

https://www.9news.com/article/news/local/public-storage-national-storage-merger-layoffs/73-60295090-0b9c-4e35-8320-aef915d468f0

A Seattle-based cheesemaker is pursuing the purchase of a recently shuttered Wisconsin manufacturing facility. This move comes shortly after the current owner announced the plant's closure and subsequent layoffs. The company intends to restart operations at the site. They also plan to rehire a significant portion of the workers who were let go. This potential acquisition represents an expansion into the Midwest for the business.

Shullsburg, Wisconsin

https://www.ien.com/food-beverage/video/22971252/seattle-cheesemaker-looks-to-save-shuttered-wisconsin-facility

Will Circle have more success with blockchain than IBM did? See https://www.circle.com/pressroom/circle-acquires-ibm-blockchain-patent-portfolio

Lumber producer Interfor is shifting its corporate support functions from British Columbia to Peachtree City, Georgia. This move aims to align corporate operations with the majority of its business, which is located in the US South and Northwest. This strategic relocation follows a trend of Canadian manufacturers moving operations to the United States. Interfor's decision is influenced by the significant portion of its sales and operations already based in the US.

https://woodcentral.com.au/interfor-corporate-functions-us/

What’s with the reduced spending? Haven’t seen it like since 2000!!!

Spending has been halted. They are looking at every nickel and dime. Is the bank being acquired? I haven’t seen it like this since 2000

From the earnings release:
Software — revenues of $7.8 billion, up 5 percent:

• Hybrid Cloud (Red Hat) up 11 percent
• Automation up 4 percent, up 3 percent at constant currency
• Data up 19 percent, up 18 percent at constant currency
• Transaction Processing down 8 percent, down 9 percent at constant currency

$M
Hybrid Cloud 1,998
Automation 1,951
Data 1,782
Transaction Processing 2,030

Obviously Hybrid Cloud = Red Hat and Transaction Processing = all the old legacy mainframe SW like IMS, CICS, TPF, etc. But where do some of the other recent large SW acquisitions go? I assume Turbonomic and Apptio go under Automation? Datastax and Confluent go under Data? Where does Hashicorp go?

My sense is that pretty much ALL of the reported SW growth is coming from those 6 relatively recent acquisitions, not anything actually developed at IBM. But I'm curious which of those acquisitions are contributing most.

Did Broadcom acquire VMware, raise prices for many businesses both large and small, decide it no longer wanted smaller clients and instead focus on large, profitable customers, and lay off employees who may then have been hired by companies like Nutanix?

Cross Country Healthcare has been acquired by a subsidiary of private equity firm Knox Lane. The transaction will take the company private. Joel Tremblay has been appointed as the new CEO, succeeding co-founder Kevin Clark. This deal was finalized after shareholders approved the merger. The acquisition is valued at $437 million.

http://www.modernhealthcare.com/mergers-acquisitions/mh-healthcare-deals-live-updates/

What happened to the other BU's that were sold off? Did all employees get laid off?
To be sold off seems like a good thing at this point, or is that just wishful thinking?

When FIS gets sold then executive team members will get hefty bonuses- ranging from 10 to 100 million.
Staff members get eggs to eat.

Music technology firm inMusic has reportedly laid off approximately 100 employees from its subsidiary, Native Instruments. These alleged job cuts have impacted all departments within the company. Native Instruments has declined to comment on the situation. This follows inMusic's acquisition of Native Instruments earlier this year. The company had previously entered preliminary insolvency proceedings.

https://musictech.com/news/industry/why-did-inmusic-lay-off-100-employees-from-native-instruments/

As per some speculations, FIS was bought out private equity firm. But deal did not go through as the current executive team asked for 500 million bonus payoff.
The board and buyer was willing to pay 200 million. Each Leadership team member would have received 10 to 25 million bonus, but they were adamant for at least 25 - 50 million each.

Finally the buyer took the deal off the table.

Commonwealth Financial's chief digital officer has left the company shortly after its acquisition by LPL Financial. This departure follows recent layoffs impacting Commonwealth's back-office staff. While not directly linked, these events are typical after a large-scale merger. The acquisition, valued at $2.7 billion, combined LPL's extensive network with Commonwealth's advisor base. Industry observers note that such shifts in leadership and workforce are common post-acquisition.

https://www.investmentnews.com/independent-broker-dealers/as-layoffs-commence-commonwealths-digital-guru-jumps-ship/267533

Bob is quoted as saying "I'll buy that for a dollar"!

In the last 15+ years, we've had two incompetent CEOs, countless reorgs, several acquisitions where we bought for premium prices and sold for cheap, and a complete erosion of culture. I think the rot is so deep at this point that any new leadership would need a miracle, not a strategy to fix this mess.

The timing on this is very interesting. . .
Plenty of money for more M&A. Buying their way to revenue growth continues. . .

https://www.techtimes.com/articles/321374/20260723/ibm-acquires-hrl-bring-silicon-spin-qubits-its-anderon-quantum-foundry.htm

Q2 is out. Revenue basically flat. Free cash flow flat for the half. And yet the letter reads like a highlight reel: double-digit growth here, “strong performance” there, three bold priorities for the back half. Look closer, and the growth is concentrated in exactly the places you’d expect if the story were built on acquisitions rather than the underlying business.
Automation up 3%. Sounds modest until you remember that’s the segment carrying HashiCorp and Apptio (both bought, both being folded into the base, both getting a full year of “integration growth” before the comparison gets tough). Data up 18%, presented like IBM is winning the AI battle. Except Data is also where Confluent landed. Strip out an acquisition that closed months ago and ask what the legacy products in that category actually did on their own (that’s the number nobody puts in bold).
This is the oldest trick in inorganic growth: buy a company, fold its revenue into your segment, get a full year of easy comps while contracts get renewed and “blue-washed” under the new parent, and call the blended number your own performance. It works, for about a year. Then the acquisition anniversaries into the base, the easy comp disappears, and the segment needs the next acquisition to keep the story going. That’s not a growth engine. That’s a treadmill with a one-year lap time.
Meanwhile the parts of the business that were never propped up by an acquisition tell a rougher story. Infrastructure down 7%. Transaction Processing down 9% (they’re the same story told twice). Transaction Processing is the software that rides on Z. No mainframe refresh, no new Z capacity, no large deals closing (no new MLC licensing booked either). Hardware and software here aren’t two separate lines on a slide, they’re one engine: when Z doesn’t sell, the software tied to it doesn’t sell either, and both numbers fall together because they were never actually independent.
Which raises the uncomfortable question: how much of this business is actually layered on top of itself? Acquired revenue propping up Automation and Data while the base underneath goes quiet. Mainframe hardware and mainframe software rising and falling as one, dressed up as two separate growth stories. Each piece needs the piece below it to keep moving, or the whole structure stalls at once. Call it what you want (a treadmill, a house of cards, a pyramid where each new acquisition is there to cover for the last one’s fading comp): the pattern is the same, nothing underneath is generating growth on its own, it’s all leaning on something else that has to keep being fed.
Revenue flat overall at $17.2 billion. Free cash flow flat at $4.8 billion for the half. If the “real” IBM (the part that isn’t riding a recent purchase or a hardware refresh cycle) is shrinking while acquisitions and mainframe timing carry the average, the honest question isn’t “is IBM a software company.” It’s “whose growth is this, actually, and what happens the quarter the props stop arriving on schedule?”
And right on schedule, the answer on offer is another reshuffle (new titles, new coverage models, a new operating structure for the back half). But renaming jobs doesn’t change what’s underneath them. If the growth was never really organic to begin with, no amount of reorganizing who sells it or what they’re called is going to make it real.
And this isn’t a new discovery. The pattern has been visible on the ground for years (it just took a bad quarter for the market to finally notice what employees already knew). That’s the part worth sitting with: this wasn’t leadership missing a hidden signal. It was leadership seeing it, for years, and being too arrogant to admit the story needed correcting. Too invested in a stock price number (chasing $300 a share) to step back and ask whether the growth underneath it was real.
And even if the July reorg were the right diagnosis, it isn’t the right timeline. Deployment takes months to show up as revenue under the best conditions, longer when the team doing it just got reshuffled and has to relearn who owns what. A reorg launched mid-year, needing to prove itself by year-end, is asking for a “wow” effect on a clock that deployment has never once run on. Nobody deploys enterprise software in one or two quarters just because leadership needs a good Q4 slide. So the real question isn’t whether the numbers improve by December; it’s whether anyone at the top is honest enough to say, out loud, that they won’t, and that expecting otherwise is expecting a miracle from a plan that was never built with that timeline in mind.
Numbers tell the truth when you sit with them long enough. Put makeup on them (bold a growth rate, bury the segment it came from, skip the base it’s being compared against) and they’ll tell you whatever story needs telling that quarter. This quarter’s story needed rescuing. The last-minute reorg landing on top of it isn’t the fix. It’s one more coat of makeup on a number that’s going to need a lot more than that to hold up next quarter, when the acquisitions currently doing the heavy lifting start looking like ordinary IBM again.

Biopharmaceutical companies have seen fewer layoffs in the first half of 2026 compared to the previous year. However, the total number of job cuts for the full year may still match 2025 levels. This outcome hinges on a significant increase in layoffs during the second half of the year. Mergers and acquisitions activity, which has risen substantially, could also contribute to future workforce reductions. The size of individual layoff rounds and the impact of M&A will be key factors in determining the year's final tally.

July 23, 2026

https://www.biospace.com/job-trends/biopharma-layoffs-must-double-in-h2-for-2026-to-match-2025-cuts

Q2 is out. Revenue basically flat. Free cash flow flat for the half. And yet the letter reads like a highlight reel: double-digit growth here, “strong performance” there, three bold priorities for the back half. Look closer, and the growth is concentrated in exactly the places you’d expect if the story were built on acquisitions rather than the underlying business.
Automation up 3%. Sounds modest until you remember that’s the segment carrying HashiCorp and Apptio (both bought, both being folded into the base, both getting a full year of “integration growth” before the comparison gets tough). Data up 18%, presented like IBM is winning the AI battle. Except Data is also where Confluent landed. Strip out an acquisition that closed months ago and ask what the legacy products in that category actually did on their own (that’s the number nobody puts in bold).
This is the oldest trick in inorganic growth: buy a company, fold its revenue into your segment, get a full year of easy comps while contracts get renewed and “blue-washed” under the new parent, and call the blended number your own performance. It works, for about a year. Then the acquisition anniversaries into the base, the easy comp disappears, and the segment needs the next acquisition to keep the story going. That’s not a growth engine. That’s a treadmill with a one-year lap time.
Meanwhile the parts of the business that were never propped up by an acquisition tell a rougher story. Infrastructure down 7%. Transaction Processing down 9% (they’re the same story told twice). Transaction Processing is the software that rides on Z. No mainframe refresh, no new Z capacity, no large deals closing (no new MLC licensing booked either). Hardware and software here aren’t two separate lines on a slide, they’re one engine: when Z doesn’t sell, the software tied to it doesn’t sell either, and both numbers fall together because they were never actually independent.
Which raises the uncomfortable question: how much of this business is actually layered on top of itself? Acquired revenue propping up Automation and Data while the base underneath goes quiet. Mainframe hardware and mainframe software rising and falling as one, dressed up as two separate growth stories. Each piece needs the piece below it to keep moving, or the whole structure stalls at once. Call it what you want (a treadmill, a house of cards, a pyramid where each new acquisition is there to cover for the last one’s fading comp): the pattern is the same, nothing underneath is generating growth on its own, it’s all leaning on something else that has to keep being fed.
Revenue flat overall at $17.2 billion. Free cash flow flat at $4.8 billion for the half. If the “real” IBM (the part that isn’t riding a recent purchase or a hardware refresh cycle) is shrinking while acquisitions and mainframe timing carry the average, the honest question isn’t “is IBM a software company.” It’s “whose growth is this, actually, and what happens the quarter the props stop arriving on schedule?”
And right on schedule, the answer on offer is another reshuffle (new titles, new coverage models, a new operating structure for the back half). But renaming jobs doesn’t change what’s underneath them. If the growth was never really organic to begin with, no amount of reorganizing who sells it or what they’re called is going to make it real.
And this isn’t a new discovery. The pattern has been visible on the ground for years (it just took a bad quarter for the market to finally notice what employees already knew). That’s the part worth sitting with: this wasn’t leadership missing a hidden signal. It was leadership seeing it, for years, and being too arrogant to admit the story needed correcting. Too invested in a stock price number (chasing $300 a share) to step back and ask whether the growth underneath it was real.
And even if the July reorg were the right diagnosis, it isn’t the right timeline. Deployment takes months to show up as revenue under the best conditions, longer when the team doing it just got reshuffled and has to relearn who owns what. A reorg launched mid-year, needing to prove itself by year-end, is asking for a “wow” effect on a clock that deployment has never once run on. Nobody deploys enterprise software in one or two quarters just because leadership needs a good Q4 slide. So the real question isn’t whether the numbers improve by December; it’s whether anyone at the top is honest enough to say, out loud, that they won’t, and that expecting otherwise is expecting a miracle from a plan that was never built with that timeline in mind.
Numbers tell the truth when you sit with them long enough. Put makeup on them (bold a growth rate, bury the segment it came from, skip the base it’s being compared against) and they’ll tell you whatever story needs telling that quarter. This quarter’s story needed rescuing. The last-minute reorg landing on top of it isn’t the fix. It’s one more coat of makeup on a number that’s going to need a lot more than that to hold up next quarter, when the acquisitions currently doing the heavy lifting start looking like ordinary IBM again.

Fifth Third Bancorp is implementing further workforce reductions following its acquisition of Comerica Bank. The bank will eliminate 234 positions at a former Comerica operations center. This latest action brings the total number of job cuts in Michigan to over 700. These layoffs are part of the ongoing restructuring efforts after the significant merger. The company is streamlining operations to integrate the acquired entity.

Auburn Hills, Michigan

https://www.crainsdetroit.com/banking-finance/cdb-fifth-third-layoffs-20260722/