IT staff are likely to escape job cuts announced by AstraZeneca and Glaxosmithkline (GSK).
The pharmaceuticals firms have both announced worldwide job cuts, with the former losing 8,000 on top of 15,000 earlier cuts, and GSK expected to cut up to 3,000.
Some direct IT jobs may be affected but both firms have outsourced most of their day-to-day IT. In February 2009 GSK announced it would use Microsoft's hosted services for office applications for some 100,000 staff worldwide.
AstraZenca has outsourced much of its IT too. Infosys is looking after its manufacturing, supply chain, finance, and human resources applications, IBM is hosting e-mail and office infrastructure, and Cognizant is running centralised data storage.
Neither company responded to calls for comment.
