6. New President And CEO For IBM

IBM Chairman, President and CEO Virginia Rometty in January announced her plans to step down after eight years.

Arvind Krishna (pictured), formerly the company's senior vice president for cloud and cognitive software, took the top spot in April, becoming IBM’s 10th CEO in the enterprise giant’s 108-year-history. James Whitehurst, formerly senior vice president of IBM and CEO of Red Hat, was named IBM president.

Rometty had led IBM through its longest financial downturn and transition to focusing on cloud computing and building its artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities. She re-energized the company with last July’s $34 billion purchase of open-source software vendor Red Hat, one of 65 acquisitions completed during her tenure.

Solution providers interviewed by CRN cited the need for Krishna to reinvigorate IBM’s channel strategy to grow its cloud services revenue and strengthen partners’ midmarket and enterprise businesses. And in May, IBM said it was significantly re-engineering its IBM PartnerWorld channel program to prepare partners for building custom solutions and providing integrated hybrid cloud services.

During his keynote address at the IBM Think Digital conference in May, Krishna told virtual attendees that AI, the cloud and 5G networks are the “powerful core technologies all of you will use to translate how business operates.” Blockchain and quantum computing also will play a major role in digital technology transformations of the future, he said. Krishna cited an open hybrid cloud computing platform—thanks to its Red Hat acquisition—as IBM’s competitive advantage in those technologies.

“We have joined forces with Red Hat to give you the needed capability to build mission-critical apps once and run them anywhere,” he said.