Cloud News
Kyndryl Cloud Leader On AWS, Azure, Google And IBM ‘Pivot’
Mark Haranas
‘CIOs went into cloud with that cost-cutting mindset. They’re finding that not only are they not saving money, the sprawl and the expense on cloud is going through the roof,’ Kyndryl’s Global Cloud Practice Leader Harish Grama tells CRN.
As organizations of all shapes and sizes hastily flocked to the cloud over the past several years, many are now raising their eyebrows as cloud costs are going through the roof.
Kyndryl, the $17 billion IT services behemoth spun out of IBM, is helping countless customers implement and manage a cloud environment that optimizes cost, drives innovation and helps businesses grow thanks, in part, to partnering with cloud leaders Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.
“CIOs went into cloud with that cost-cutting mindset. They’re finding that not only are they not saving money, the sprawl and the expense on cloud is going through the roof,” said Harish Grama, Kyndryl’s global cloud practice leader, in an interview with CRN. “In their haste to get to the cloud, they’re not doing it right.”
[Related: VMware vSphere Vs. AWS Outposts Vs. Azure Stack: Private Cloud Face-Off]
Grama is a longtime IBM cloud executive who joined Kyndryl after the company was spun-out of IBM in 2021. He said Kyndryl’s cloud strategy is vastly different from IBM’s in 2023.
“As we spun off into Kyndryl, one of the first things we did was we said, ‘IBM technologies are good, but the bulk of cloud, especially, is everywhere else. So we have to be premium partners with all the hyperscalers,’” said Grama. “And 18 months into this, I’ve now got over 30,000 people with hyperscalers certifications, for example. Whereas coming into Kyndryl in November of 2021, we had close to zero. So it really is opening up the aperture to work beyond IBM technologies.”
AWS, Google, Microsoft Azure
Kyndryl, which has around 90,000 employees, is now a top global partner for the three cloud market share leaders: AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. These three cloud leaders, combined, own approximately two-thirds of the global cloud infrastructure services market.
“The commodity stuff—which is infrastructure, compute, storage, network—they all three do it well,” he said. “Now, once you start to go further up the stack, or what people call platform-as-a-service, where you also incidentally get into things like lock-in, etc. That’s where you have to be very careful.”
In an interview with CRN, Grama discusses what AWS, Azure and Google Cloud do well, why cloud costs have become out of control, and Kyndryl’s strategy to help customers find their cloud nirvana.
