IBM Appoints An Indian CEO For The First Time Ever: Arvind Krishna Will Now Lead 108 Year Old IBM

By Mohul Ghosh Last updated Jan 31, 2020

IBM Appoints An Indian CEO For The First Time Ever: Arvind Krishna Will Now Lead $121 Bn Worth IBM

108 year old IBM, considered as one of the most powerful IT companies in the world, has now appointed an Indian CEO, for the first time ever.

Arvind Krishna, 57, will now lead $121 billion worth IBM, globally.

Arvind Krishna: The New CEO Of IBM

Arvind Krishna right now heads IBM’s cloud and cognitive software unit and will become the first-ever Indian CEO of IBM.

Krishna will replace CEO Virginia Rometty, who was IBM’s first-ever woman CEO. She will carry on for the entire 2020, and by the end of the year, she will give way to Arvind Krishna.

Arvind Krishna was also the principal architect of IBM’s acquisition of Red Hat, which redefined the software industry as we know it.

Current CEO Virginia Rometty will retire after spending close to 40 years in the company, and for the last 8 years, she served as the CEO of IBM.

IBM’s investors appreciated the news of Arvind Krishna taking over as IBM CEO, as their shares rose by 5% in a session of extended trading.

Who Is Arvind Krishna?

Arvind is an IIT-Kanpur pass out with Electrical Engineering as the main subject.

Later, he completed Ph.D. in Electrical & Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and joined IBM in 1990.

He is currently the senior vice president for IBM’s cloud and cognitive software, and he is known for finalizing and executing the $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat by IBM in 2018.

By becoming the CEO of IBM, Arvind joins other Indian CEOs heading the biggest IT companies in the world: Sundar Pichai who is the CEO of Google, Satya Nadella who heads Microsoft, and Shantanu Narayen, who heads Adobe.

IBM’s Strategy For Appointing Arvind Krishna As CEO

Under the leadership of Virginia Rometty, IBM started focussing extensively on the market of hybrid cloud, and is fighting with Microsoft and Amazon for grabbing a substantial market share.

Since Arvind heads the Cloud division, it is clear that IBM wants to bet heavily on the emerging market of Cloud technologies, and the best way forward is by appointing an expert of this domain.

IBM’s focus on Cloud, AI and its AI data-analytics tool called Watson is the focus for IBM in 2020 and beyond, and it seems that Arvind is the best person to take the legacy of IBM forward.

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