
IBM Names Arvind Krishna CEO - varunperla
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-01-30/ibm-names-arvind-krishna-as-ceo-rometty-to-retire-at-year-s-end
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RcouF1uZ4gsC
From the CNBC article covering this: [https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/30/ibm-ceo-
ginni-rometty-steps-...](https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/30/ibm-ceo-ginni-
rometty-steps-down-arvind-krishna-to-take-over.html)

>In a release, Rometty described Krishna as a “brilliant technologist who has
played a significant role in developing our key technologies such as
artificial intelligence, cloud, quantum computing and blockchain”

Sounds like IBM's strategy is going all in on buzzwords.

~~~
H8crilA
IBM is a consulting company that tries to sell some of their cloud to their
clients and some of their buzzwords to their investors. Normal silicon valley
stuff, except that IBM manages to show up with some positive cash flow at the
end of the day, unlike modern VC darlings.

~~~
rurp
> except that IBM manages to show up with some positive cash flow at the end
> of the day, unlike modern VC darlings

Comparing IBM to a VC funded startup doesn't make any sense to me. Big old
tech companies (like IBM) in Silicon Valley mostly do turn a profit, some
quite a bit more than IBM.

~~~
H8crilA
True. A fun fact: most also turned profit pre-IPO. Look up old S-1's.

I was just joking about the buzzword mumbo jumbo. I want someone to take me
for an AI ride in a self driving cloud. I already had so many social network
and Uber-for-X rides, those days were cool.

Does your mom do fintech, too? That's sooo cool!

~~~
rurp
Heh, I actually agree with you on the buzzword mumbo jumbo. There's no doubt
IBM can throw out meaningless buzzwordy phrases with SV's best.

------
krn
Another Indian-born tech CEO? It's incredible. IBM joins Microsoft, Google,
Adobe, Nokia, and Harman in this regard. Also, MasterCard and PepsiCo (until
2018). I wonder how much it's a cultural thing.

~~~
programmertote
This is a biased, but honest observation that I'd like to share. I've been
working for a big corp for about 5 years now. I was born in a SE Asian country
and came to the US for college. I have worked with a lot of India-born people.

As a fellow foreigner and as an Asian, I can tell that more often than not
Indian people are bolder and more aggressive in asking for what they want
(e.g., one of my Indian colleague asked for salary raise and the permission to
go back to India in December for a month every year as part of his negotiation
when he applied and got offer from another company; what he told me was
simple, "It's my responsibility to ask. It's my boss' task to refuse or
accept.") On top of that, some (not everyone; some are meek/introvert like
myself). Because of their boldness, Indian people seem to be more successful
at making themselves more visible, which is very important in corporate
culture to get ahead. On top of that, some of them are pretty clever at
courting favor of their superiors and/or playing office politics. I have seen
quite a few of my peers/acquaintances from India who climbed corporate ladder
pretty fast, so I'm not surprised they are doing well in terms of
representation in C-level roles.

~~~
booboolayla
Don't forget the infamous in-group preferences they bring as soon as they take
over.

~~~
programmertote
You notice it as well. :) My division was managed by an Indian managing
director, who succeeded a Caucasian boss prior 2018. Within 2 years of his
arrival (and his departure for another company at the end of 2019), our
department has the ratio of Indian to non-Indian ratio suddenly goes from
around 20% to 70% (this increase in ratio accelerated because quite a few of
the non-Indian people left in the past year).

The guy that I mentioned above who asked for one whole month of vacation also
encouraged another Indian guy to do the same and they both took off last
December to India while some team members from other projects were asked to
cover for their absence by the ex-managing director. Worse, that guy also
somehow convinced our management to hire his then-fiance in mid 2019 directly
from India as a manager. I just can't believe how he pulled these off, but I
have to give it to him for being really good at getting things done the way he
wants them.

~~~
lowdose
Good for him and good for you you can appreciate another man running his own
show. I sometimes have the feeling a lot of guys are more jealous than women.

------
cpitman
So, not working with any insider knowledge (I work for Red Hat, but reading
the news like everyone else), but the other news is that Jim Whitehurst is
going to be the IBM President. Hopefully a big push in keeping Red Hat's
culture relevant and influencing IBM to transform.

~~~
chrisseaton
> Hopefully a big push in keeping Red Hat's culture

How would you describe RedHat culture?

~~~
cpitman
I've been at Red Hat so long now (12 years) that it can be easy to take things
for granted, but the biggest thing is just how open and transparent a company
it is. There's not a lot of silo's or little kingdoms fighting each other,
we're all generally working together.

For example, we're a fairly large company (10000+), but we still have an all
company mailing list. And it is used by anyone to raise a concern, talk about
an opportunity, etc. And that starts a conversation with anyone participating.
I am on the Services side, but there is no barrier in place for me to reach
out to anyone in the BU, Engineering, Marketing, whatever. I don't think I
have ever had to pass a message up the chain of command for it to be passed
down somewhere else, I'm just allowed to communicate when and how I need to.

The other way it comes out is that open-source has truly warped our way of
thinking about things. For example, there's not a culture of restricting
access to our own documents, team drives, etc. One of my peers was working on
a new slide deck on a team drive, hadn't really shared it with anyone, then
found out that one slide was copied into a presentation done by an EMEA team a
day later. That kind of easy access and reuse is just _standard_. It applies
to code, but also everything else we do.

I've worked with lots of clients through my job, and it is always eye opening
when their employees are worried about "sticking out their neck" or otherwise
rocking the boat. Or companies where a developer trying to talk to the
business would be an incident with your manager giving you a talk. This is
just completely foreign to anyone at Red Hat.

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bluedevil2k
It’ll be interesting to see where the new CEO takes IBM and what his strategy
is to make IBM relevant again. The last decade has been stagnant (if you’re
being nice) and abysmal (if you’re being honest) for IBM, missing out on all
the forecasted tech growth categories. Cloud services, they’re never even in
the discussion. Mobile - forget it. AI...maybe. They need to find a niche they
can excel in, 1 least, in order to create the buzz needed to make them a
relevant company again.

~~~
tssva
I'm not going to argue that IBM is currently healthy and performing as they
should but they did have over $22 billion in cloud revenue for 2019 so they
are evidently in the discussion somewhere.

~~~
tenebrisalietum
Also couldn't they basically sit on their rear and collect on mainframe
contracts from now until the end of time?

~~~
kjs3
No. There's immense pressure on the mainframe market; there's a constant
drumbeat of mainframe-killer tech that's _definitely_ better/faster/stronger
(and, on rare occasions, is...at least for some narrowly defined workload).
IBM has to work very hard keep mainframes competitive technology, and even
harder at sales/marketing to fend off the alternatives.

~~~
passer_byer
What competitive technology are you thinking here? IBM z-series mainframe
carry enormous amounts of transaction workloads today. They are deeply
embedded in most of the Fortune 1000 companies. Hitachi was the only real
competitor left standing and they dumped their mainframe business in 2017
since they were unable to get traction outside of Japan.

In the early 90's, there were efforts by customers to get rid of their
mainframes which put IBM on the ropes then, until Lou Gerstner took over as
CEO and stabilized the business. It's not like these transaction workloads can
be easily ported elsewhere since some of them go back as far as the early
1970's. Those customers able to ditch their mainframes did so a while back.
The rest of these systems will remain due to risks and costs of migrating to a
suitable alternative. It's not a huge revenue stream for IBM, but a very
profitable one.

~~~
9nGQluzmnq3M
But mainframe customers are still dumping them, and they're not picking IBM:
[https://cloud.google.com/press-releases/2020/0121/sabre-
and-...](https://cloud.google.com/press-releases/2020/0121/sabre-and-google-
cloud-partnership/)

Note that SABRE is the OG enterprise app, by most measures it was _the_ first
non-military/govt/research computer system, going live in 1960 (!) and the
core still runs System/360 (which they had to migrate _to_ , not from!).

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filereaper
Good to see an engineer taking helm of the company from the previous CEOs
which were from sales.

Maybe we'll have a renaissance like what Satya did to Microsoft...

~~~
dbish
Satya wasn't an engineer at microsoft.

~~~
eganist
> Satya wasn't an engineer at microsoft.

This is true, strictly speaking. But (also strictly speaking) he was an
engineer

> Nadella attended the Hyderabad Public School, Begumpet[7] before receiving a
> bachelor's in electrical engineering[8] from the Manipal Institute of
> Technology (then part of Mangalore University) in Karnataka in 1988.[9][10]
> Nadella subsequently traveled to the U.S. to study for an M.S. in computer
> science at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee,[11][12] receiving his
> degree in 1990.[13] Later, he received an MBA from the University of Chicago
> Booth School of Business.[14]

([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satya_Nadella](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satya_Nadella))

And that's all GP said.

> Good to see an engineer taking helm of the company from the previous CEOs
> which were from sales.

~~~
xxcode
Nadella was a Program Manager at Microsoft.

~~~
eganist
And? He started as an engineer. GP didn't say he had to be an engineer at his
current company.

------
RobLach
>[New CEO] Krishna is currently the head of IBM’s cloud and cognitive software
unit and was a principal architect of the company’s purchase of Red Hat

All-in with that then.

------
pgodzin
What's the difference between the President and CEO roles?

~~~
rossdavidh
In at least some cases, the CEO is the one actually running things, and the
President is the one whose job is to fire the CEO if they're screwing up. Not
that it is put that way, of course.

~~~
war1025
> President is the one whose job is to fire the CEO if they're screwing up.

I assumed the Chairman of the Board would fill that role?

President sounds to me like a step below CEO, but I know very little about
corporate structuring...

~~~
rossdavidh
Depends on the company, but it is not uncommon for the President and Chairman
of the Board to be the same person.

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Trias11
IBM's Ballmer finally stepping out.

Hopefully IBM's Nadella is coming in!

------
Rochus
Krishna is always shown in blue, so it seems the obvious choice ;-)

------
aluminussoma
Old timers talked about IBM the way people used to talk about Microsoft in the
90s and Google in the 2000s. The new CEO being someone who's been there his
entire working life does not sound like a recipe for success.

------
ashwinaj
Doesn't matter what his ethnicity is, if he doesn't produce (whatever that
definition is: stock price, technology output, new market etc.) he'll be
kicked out. At the CEO level, nepotism does not work (unless he has a golden
parachute, does he?). Why the hell will he hire his "buddies" who are not
productive?

So comparing him to low-mid level Indian managers who are fighting over scraps
is comparing apples to oranges.

------
jdkee
Is IBM even relevant anymore or are they simply another McKinsey type
consulting firm Who happens to sell mainframes to banks?

~~~
Barrin92
if generating 80 billion in revenue and making your shareholders money by
selling mainframes to banks is irrelevant then I wouldn't want to be relevant.

I continue to be puzzled by the derision that companies on this site get just
because they do regular business.

~~~
pas
They do that much because they are the incumbent. So they make that kind of
money despite how shitty they are.

Technology/engineering/Moore's law can paper over a lot of dumb institutional
inefficiency.

Also, just to be clear. It's very hard to do much better, big groups are hard
to keep nimble, honest, agile, etc.

------
Lutzb
My bet was on Jim Whitehurst.

~~~
bonzini
That was surely most Red Hatters' dream, but Arvind Krishna as CEO is probably
the best possible outcome for Red Hat among the realistic ones (not counting
that Whitehurst will be President, while Ginny Rometty was President and CEO).

Arvind Krishna was "Jim Whitehurst's boss" until now (Red Hat is under the IBM
cloud division), and back when the acquisition was announced in 2018 he
visited one of the Red Hat offices for a sort of "town hall" meeting. He
almost unanimously made a very good impression, and he won over quite a few
employees that at the time were skeptical about the acquisition.

~~~
filesystemdude
> Arvind Krishna was "Jim Whitehurst's boss" until now

Not true. Jim (and Red Hat under him) reported directly to Ginni. Red Hat was
under IBM cloud for revenue reporting, though, but the distinction is
material.

~~~
bonzini
He reported to both.

------
known
Reminds me of [https://archive.vn/UpV1Y](https://archive.vn/UpV1Y)

------
mathattack
Good for them that they have a technologist as the boss. Seems like the
ascendancy of RedHat isn’t a great sign. They are still in the audit business
rather than the technology business.

------
louwrentius
Can we derive anything meaningful from the fact that this Hacker News item
almost gets no response and just a few comments?

~~~
clSTophEjUdRanu
I'll never forgive them for subjecting me to Clearcase or DOORS.

~~~
posix_compliant
Clearcase was my first version control software. I don't think I'll ever
experience such feelings of tranquil bliss and relief as when I learned and
switched to git.

~~~
clSTophEjUdRanu
I was still using it at my previous employer that I left a few months ago.

------
ptrenko
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~~~
hvidgaard
I believe your severely underestimate the influence of regional culture.

~~~
ptrenko
\---

~~~
hvidgaard
Something as localized as the culture in a family can have tremendous effect
on people.

------
vernie
I was expecting to see the Watson logo

~~~
symplee
Exactly. Don't be fooled by this clever marketing, we all know who's really
pulling the strings behind the scenes...

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watson_(computer)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watson_\(computer\))

