Ellen Hancock, the high profile senior vice-president and the highest ranking woman executive at IBM Corp, is out. She is leaving IBM as the company prepares a root-and-branch reorganisation of its large but flabby software business, the Wall Street Journal reported. The software business is pegged at $11,000m a year but is still dominated by licence revenue from mainframe operating systems and mainframe system software. Ms Hancock, 51, headed both the software business and the $5,000m a year networking division. Chairman Louis Gerstner reportedly recently indicated that he was not happy with the performance of the software division and was planning to take steps to make it more profitable and give it a higher profile. Ms Hancock has revealed that Gerstner was frustrated that while IBM has one of the industry’s biggest software operations, it has far less name recognition than Microsoft Corp, Lotus Development Corp and others, and is burdened with the enormous near-$2,000m investment in OS/2. Ms Hancock had said in the interview that she was spending a lot of time on the OS/2 effort.
