New IBM CEO Arvind Krishna described as 'brilliant, right person to lead'

Indian-origin technology executive Arvind Krishna has been elected Chief Executive Officer of American IT giant IBMafter a "world-class succession process", succeeding Virginia Rometty, who described him as the right CEO for the next era at IBM and well-positioned" to lead the company into the cloud and cognitive era.
The IBM Board of Directors elected Krishna as company CEO and member of the Board of Directors effective April 6. Krishna is currently IBM Senior Vice President for Cloud and Cognitive Software and will succeed Rometty, 62 who will retire after almost 40 years with the company at the end of the year.

Krishna, 57, had joined IBM in 1990 and has an undergraduate degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, and a PhD in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
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," Krishna said in a press statement released by IBM.
Krishna said IBM has such talented people and technology that we can bring together to help our clients solve their toughest problems.
I am looking forward to working with IBMers, Red Hatters and clients around the world at this unique time of fast-paced change in the IT industry. 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," Krishna said.
Krishna's appointment as head of the global IT giant adds to the growing list of Indian-origin executives at the helm of some of the biggest multinational companies. Krishna joins the club that includes Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, MasterCard CEO Ajay Banga, PepsiCo's former CEO Indra Nooyi and Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen.
Rometty, who had been IBM's Chairman, President and CEO, will continue as Executive Chairman of the Board and serve through the end of the year, when she will retire. She described Krishna as the right CEO for the next era at IBM who is well-positioned to lead IBM and its clients into the cloud and cognitive era."
Rometty said 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. He is also a superb operational leader, able to win today while building the business of tomorrow.
She said Krishna has grown IBM's Cloud and Cognitive Software business and led the largest acquisition in the company's history. Krishna was a principal architect" of the company's acquisition of Red Hat.
Through his multiple experiences running businesses in IBM, Arvind has built an outstanding track record of bold transformations and proven business results, and is an authentic, values-driven leader.
The IBM Board also elected James Whitehurst, IBM Senior Vice President and CEO of Red Hat, as IBM President.
Rometty added that in both Krishna and Whitehurst, the Board has elected a proven technical and business-savvy leadership team.
Lead Director of the IBM Board of Directors Michael Eskew said with the strong foundation now established by Rometty for IBM's future, the Board is confident that Krishna is the "right CEO to lead IBM.
The Board ran a world-class succession process and found in Arvind a leader with the business acumen, operational skills, and technology vision needed to guide IBM in this fast-moving industry," Eskew said.
Chairman of the Board's Executive Compensation and Management Resources Committee Alex Gorsky said Krishna thinks and executes squarely at the intersection of business and technology. Gorsky said he is an ideal leader to succeed Rometty and take IBM and its clients into the next chapter of the cloud and cognitive era.
The IBM statement said that as IBM Senior Vice President for Cloud and Cognitive Software, Krishna led the IBM business unit that provides the cloud and data platform on which IBM's clients build the future.
His current responsibilities also included the IBM Cloud, IBM Security and Cognitive Applications business, and IBM Research. He leads the unit's strategy, product design, offering development, marketing, sales and service and also guides IBM's overall strategy in core and emerging technologies including artificial intelligence, quantum computing, blockchain, cloud platform services, data-driven solutions, and nanotechnology, according to his profile on the IBM website.
Previously, he was general manager of IBM Systems and Technology Group's development and manufacturing organisation, responsible for developing and engineering advanced semiconductor materials through microprocessors, servers, and storage systems. Prior to that, Arvind was general manager of IBM Information Management, which included database, information integration, and big data software solutions. He served as vice president of strategy for IBM Software. He also held several key technical roles in IBM Software and IBM Research, where he pioneered IBM's security software business.
According to his profile on the IBM website, Krishna is the recipient of distinguished alumni awards from IITK and the University of Illinois, is the co-author of 15 patents, has been the editor of IEEE and ACM journals, and has published extensively in technical conferences and journals.

IBM laying off 2,000 employees not performing "at a competitive level"

International Business Machines Corp. is laying off about 2,000 employees this week, according to news reports, as the company reshapes its business.
The move amounts to less than 1% of if its workforce, which totaled 350,600 at the end of last year.

IBM confirmed that a “small percentage of employees” who are not performing “at a competitive level” would be leaving the company. “We are continuing to re-position our team to align with our focus on the high value segments of the IT market – while aggressively hiring in critical new areas that deliver value for our clients and IBM," the company said in a statement.
The Wall Street Journal and CNBC earlier reported on the job cuts.
In 2016, the Armonk, New York-based company, started to cut jobs in the US as part of a strategy to shift its workforce toward cloud computing and artificial intelligence operations. It made additional reductions in 2017.
IBM has lagged behind the overall technology sector for years, with its 1% revenue growth in 2018 breaking a six-year run of declining sales. In the past, the tech giant has laid off staff in slower businesses in order to beef up resources in new areas. IBM has about 25,000 open job positions worldwide.

4 Indian-origin women among America's top 50 female tech moguls: Forbes

Four Indian-origin women have been named by Forbes among America's top 50 female technology moguls, a list that includes tech heavyweights IBM CEO Ginni Rometty and Netflix executive Anne Aaron.
Padmasree Warrior, former chief technology officer (CTO) of Cisco; Komal Mangtani, senior director at app-based cab aggregator Uber; Neha Narkhede, chief technology officer and co-founder of streaming platform Confluent; and Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan, CEO and founder of identity-management company Drawbrige; are in the list.

"Women don't wait for the future. The 2018 Inaugural Top 50 Women In Technology list identifies three generations of forward-thinking technologists leading more than a dozen tech sectors across the globe," Forbes said in its 'America's Top 50 Women in Tech 2018'.
Warrior (58) served in executive positions at both Motorola and Cisco and is now the US CEO of the Chinese electric-autonomous-vehicle startup NIO.
At the $138-billion Cisco Systems, she had help Cisco the tech giant grow in influence through acquisitions. She is also on the boards of Microsoft and Spotify.
"Warrior still finds the time to mentor other women in the tech industry, stay in touch with her 1.6 million Twitter followers and follow a nightly meditation routine," the business magazine said.
Mangtani, an alumnus of Dharmsinh Desai Institute of Technology in Gujarat, heads business intelligence at Uber. Currently, she serves on the board of nonprofit organisation Women Who Code and led Uber's $1.2-billion donation and partnership with Girls Who Code to increase access to computer science.
Narkhede, who studied at Pune university, had as a software engineer at LinkedIn helped develop Apache Kafka -- which can process the huge influx of data coming from the site in real time. The data-processing software has become the heart of Confluent, an enterprise Narkhede founded with her LinkedIn co-workers to build tools for companies using Apache Kafka, Forbes said.
The 32-year-old's firm counts Goldman Sachs, Netflix and Uber as customers.
Forty-three-year-old Sivaramakrishnan's company, Drawbridge, uses large-scale artificial intelligence and machine learning to identify the different devices people.
"As the number of devices people use on a daily basis -- computers, laptops and smartphones -- increase, advertisers need a way to show ads to a person across all their devices. Facebook and Google already offer these services to advertisers, but now they have a competitor with Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan's Drawbridge," Forbes added.