Dubbed Project Chrome internally at IBM, the process will see 26 per cent of the company's workforce laid off in one fell swoop, meaning that 111,800 people could lose their jobs before the end of January based on IBM's global workforce of 430,000.

Those affected by the cuts "will all be gone by the end of February". He said that while there would be a significant number of jobs lost in the US but the axe would fall on all of IBM's locations around the world. The cuts in the US are likely to affect the company's mainframe and storage divisions most dramatically.

Ironically IBM already holds the record for the largest single corporate lay-offs .  That was when  it fired more than 60,000 of its workforce in 1993, but this would be dwarfed if Cringely's predictions come true.

Pressure was on the not-so-Big Blue when it announced another set of weak quarterly revenue figures, its eleventh straight quarter of declining revenue.

Following those results, CEO Ginni Rometty said the company was in transition but made no mention of the huge job cuts: "We are making significant progress in our transformation, continuing to shift IBM's business to higher value, and investing and positioning ourselves for the longer term."

IBM's problems stem from the fact that customers are moving their storage infrastructure to the cloud, meaning they no longer need physical data centres on site and therefore don't need service contracts with IBM to help maintain them - a business which accounts for two-thirds of IBM's revenue.