IBM names Arvind Krishna as new CEO

By Sunniva Kolostyak

IBM has selected Arvind Krishna to become the new Chief Executive Officer, as Virginia Rometty is retiring after 40 years with the company.

Rometty, IBM’s Chairman, President and CEO, will continue as the Executive Chairman of the Board until the end of the year, when she will retire. Her replacement for the CEO role, Krishna, currently works as the Senior Vice President for Cloud and Cognitive Software and was a principal architect in the Red Hat acquisition.

The company has appointed James Whitehurst, IBM Senior Vice President and CEO of Red Hat, was also elected by the board as IBM President. Both appointments will be effective from 6 April, 2020.

Rometty, now 62, has held her roles since 2012, and in those years, IBM has acquired 65 companies and built out capabilities in hybrid cloud, now a $21 billion business, security, quantum computing and blockchain, and AI. She has reinvented more than 50 per cent of IBM’s portfolio, while divesting nearly $9 billion in annual revenue to focus the portfolio on high value, integrated offerings.

Moreover, Rometty has worked to promote technology ethics and data stewardship, usher new technologies safely into society, and enable people of diverse backgrounds and education levels to participate in the digital future. She has also championed the reinvention of education around the world, including the explosive growth of the six-year Pathways in Technology Early College High Schools, or P-TECHs, which are helping prepare the workforce of the future, serving hundreds of thousands of students in 200 schools and 24 countries.

“Ginni has provided outstanding leadership for IBM, substantially transforming the company and ushering in a new cloud and cognitive era,” Michael Eskew, Lead Director of the IBM Board of Directors, said, commenting on Rometty’s retirement. “She has taken bold strategic actions to reposition IBM for the future, shedding businesses and growing new units organically and through acquisition, all while achieving record diversity and employee engagement and setting the industry standard for responsible technology ethics and data stewardship.”

Rometty commented that Krishna is the right CEO for the next IBM era. “He is a brilliant technologist who has played a significant role in developing our key technologies such as artificial intelligence, cloud, quantum computing and blockchain. He is also a superb operational leader, able to win today while building the business of tomorrow. Arvind has grown IBM’s Cloud and Cognitive Software business and led the largest acquisition in the company’s history.”

Rometty continued that Red Hat’s Whitehurst has positioned Red Hat as a leader in open-source enterprise IT software solutions and services, and was the right choice due to his ability to quickly expand the reach and benefit of that technology as part of IBM.

Krishna commented: “I am thrilled and humbled to be elected as the next Chief Executive Officer of IBM, and appreciate the confidence that Ginni and the board have placed in me.

“We have great opportunities ahead to help our clients advance the transformation of their business while also remaining the global leader in the trusted stewardship of technology. Jim will be a great partner in the next step of this journey.”