Welcome to the Cloud Wars Minute — your daily cloud news and commentary show. Each episode provides insights and perspectives around the “reimagination machine” that is the cloud.
In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I take a look at the leadership playbook Arvind Krishna used to pull IBM out of stagnation and reposition it as a streamlined, innovation-first force in AI and enterprise cloud computing.
Highlights
00:14 — It’s been interesting to watch IBM in the last couple of years, and then certainly for the last five years since CEO Arvind Krishna took over. Krishna is restoring IBM to its former glory, particularly with this $150 billion commitment to restoring research and development into advanced technologies, and a big chunk of that going into a manufacturing commitment inside the U.S.
00:56 — He’s remade the company top to bottom. IBM, for almost a century, was one of the preeminent corporations in the world. That fell off in the late ’90s and the early 2000s, and the company was struggling five years ago, in April 2020, when they named Krishna to become CEO. Krishna has just completely flipped that top to bottom.
02:15 — He got it out of this internally oriented focus. He’s sharpened the company’s focus around hybrid cloud and AI. But what’s so exciting was this next step that Krishna has taken: IBM stepping up, re-establishing itself as one of the leaders in the technology industry, where it’s no longer attempting to compete with every tech company across an absurdly broad range of market sectors.
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03:06 — But now, the many partnerships; the co-creation with customers and with partners; the renewed energy it has from developers. It’s made a commitment to manufacturing. Krishna recently announced that $150 billion commitment into the U.S. for R&D, $30 billion of that tied to advanced manufacturing around IBM mainframes and also the rapidly emerging quantum computing business that IBM has now.
04:23 — It’s strong with hybrid cloud, with AI. This commitment now that Krishna has made $30 billion of that $150 billion will go toward manufacturing those mainframes and quantum computer systems in the U.S., largely up around, you know, in New York, the Poughkeepsie manufacturing center where IBM has done things for a large part of its 114-year history.
05:00 — After those four, five years of hard work, getting stuff cleaned up internally, getting the company growing again, Krishna now has the right to stand out and make this sort of bold proclamation about where the company’s headed, making this big investment, and being seen as a power on the global stage. Hats off to them.