IBM Names New CEO: Arvind Krishna, Red Hat Deal Mastermind, Replaces Rometty

The change brings cloud and open source front and center for the company, as IBM also names former Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst as president.

Mitch Wagner, Executive Editor, Light Reading

January 30, 2020

4 Min Read
IBM Names New CEO: Arvind Krishna, Red Hat Deal Mastermind, Replaces Rometty

Big Blue is looking more purple, as Arvind Krishna takes over as CEO, replacing Ginni Rometty. Krishna headed up IBM's $34 billion Red Hat acquisition last year and is currently senior vice president for cloud and cognitive software.

Krishna takes over the CEO job April 6. Rometty, who took over as CEO in 2012, will continue as executive chairman of the board and serve through the end of the year, after almost 40 years with IBM.

Jim Whitehurst, formerly CEO of the independent Red Hat, will serve as president of IBM, also effective April 6. He is now senior vice president and CEO of Red Hat, now a business unit of IBM.

"[Krishna] is a brilliant technologist who has played a significant role in developing our key technologies such as artificial intelligence, cloud, quantum computing and blockchain," Rometty said in a statement. She also praised his operational skills.

The transition means that IBM leadership will be shared by Krishna, an insider, and Whitehurst, who brings outside perspective, having come to the company recently.

Rometty tried, only partly successfully, to transition IBM from on-premises computing -- epitomized by IBM's mainframes -- to the cloud, cognitive computing and other emerging technologies. With the Red Hat acquisition, the largest in the company's history, IBM is positioned as a multi-cloud provider, helping enterprises build infrastructures spanning the public cloud platforms, IBM's own cloud, and private cloud, including IBM's own hardware and software. Red Hat also boosted IBM's open source contributions and culture.

IBM's revenue has been faltering in recent years, but it did report a modest increase at $21.78 billion earlier this month, largely due to Red Hat revenue which exceeded $1 billion in the fourth quarter, up 24% year-over-year.

Learn more about how the cloud is transforming the service provider sector at Light Reading's Cloud content channel.

IBM watchers responded quickly to the news on Twitter:

IBM hasn't been big in the telco and service provider business, but it's had a couple of significant deals relatively recently.

IBM announced a deal in July with AT&T Business, the arm of AT&T Communications that provides services to enterprises and small and midsized businesses. In the deal, AT&T will use Red Hat Enterprise Linux and OpenShift to manage Kubernetes containerized workloads for applications serving enterprise customers. Later that week, AT&T Communications as a whole announced a cloud deal with Microsoft.

And IBM and Vodafone struck a $550 million cloud deal, announced in January 2019, to provide European enterprises with cloud and networking services.

IBM also did a multi-million dollar deal last year with Vodafone Idea in India to improve customer experience for that telco's retail and business customers. Additionally, Vodafone Idea is using Red Hat technology to link more than 100 data centers in a sweeping "universal cloud" based on OpenStack.

For more background on IBM's recent service provider history, see these articles:

— Mitch Wagner

Light Reading

About the Author

Mitch Wagner

Executive Editor, Light Reading

San Diego-based Mitch Wagner is many things. As well as being "our guy" on the West Coast (of the US, not Scotland, or anywhere else with indifferent meteorological conditions), he's a husband (to his wife), dissatisfied Democrat, American (so he could be President some day), nonobservant Jew, and science fiction fan. Not necessarily in that order.

He's also one half of a special duo, along with Minnie, who is the co-habitor of the West Coast Bureau and Light Reading's primary chewer of sticks, though she is not the only one on the team who regularly munches on bark.

Wagner, whose previous positions include Editor-in-Chief at Internet Evolution and Executive Editor at InformationWeek, will be responsible for tracking and reporting on developments in Silicon Valley and other US West Coast hotspots of communications technology innovation.

Beats: Software-defined networking (SDN), network functions virtualization (NFV), IP networking, and colored foods (such as 'green rice').

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