Sign up for our Technology Newsletter 
Juniper Boots Employees
Juniper Networks plans to reduce its global workforce by six percent and focus on its high-growth businesses. Juniper said most of the cuts would impact middle management positions and that it expected to incur cash charges of about $35 million in the first quarter, related to severance and other expenses. The company had 9,483 full-time employees as of December 31.
Juniper also said it would stop development of the application delivery controller technology, which helps remove excess load from servers, resulting in a non-cash intangible asset impairment charge of about $85 million. The company said it plans to consolidate its facilities, flog off of about 300,000 square feet of leased facilities.
Juniper added that it expected to record other non-cash asset write-downs of about $10 million in the first quarter and that it expects to carry out more restructuring in the second quarter.
Hedge fund Elliott recently claimed that Juniper shares were “undervalued” and could be worth $35-$40 if Juniper focused on revamping its core business of making routers and switches for mobile carriers such as Verizon and AT&T. Shares of Juniper are currently worth at $26.35.
IBM Freezes Employee Salaries
IBM this year won’t be granting any pay raises to its executives or to many of its workers in its Global Technology Services division.
The company said it is only giving pay raises to workers with high-demand skills that the company needs.
IBM customarily issues pay raises during the mid-year period.
“There are targeted skill groups of employees that are eligible for salary increases in 2012,” said Trink Guarino, an IBM spokeswoman. “No executives will be eligible for salary increases.”
Business Insider Tuesday published an internal IBM memo announcing the action that was sent to employees from Global Technology Services executives.
One IBM employee, who didn’t want to be identified, said he believes the lack of pay raises “is part of IBM’s hyper-aggressive plan to meet its 2015 roadmap.”
That IBM roadmap lays out an aggressive growth strategy, which calls for increasing the company’s earnings per share by $20 by 2015.
The employee noted that the company has been spending billions in stock buybacks, but says it can’t afford pay increases.
Rather than reaching profit goals “the old-fashioned way by increasing market share, developing and selling new products,” the company is “maniacally focused on cutting labor costs and off-shoring work to low-cost countries,” the employee said.