New IBM CEO Arvind Krishna says hybrid cloud will be bigger than mainframes, services, middleware IBM’s new CEO Arvind Krishna has revealed the letter he sent to staff on his first day in the job, and it’s big on hybrid cloud as a new platform for IBM’s future. Krishna was anointed as IBM CEO in January 2020, when the company’s board made a surprise announcement that Virginia Rometty would become as executive chairman of …
I think he got his tenses mixed up there.
Over the last 10 years has squandered its customers trust in order to meet quarterly revenue targets.
The cumulative wisdom has been fired and replaced with cheaper easier to bully youngsters.
I wish him luck but I think Ginny has hollowed out the once great company and its beyond recovery.
Still makes a ton of money of the ancient zOS platform.
Some IBMers have trust with their customers. That's for sure.
(I still remember my serial number and I still have connections to friends who haven't yet retired or left the borg.)
But yes, IBM as a whole does not. Nor do they have the deep skills Arvind thinks that they do.
(This from someone who's friends with the guy(s) who have gone in to help train IBM on essential skills. )
IBM's biggest hurdle/handicap... getting rid of the old culture. Maybe the RedHat blokes can fix that.
Should post anon ...
Whenever anyone else in IBM asked me for my "serial number" I told them that I hadn't knowingly become a washing machine.
But, sadly, that's what they had started to call it when I left in 2008, having decided in 2007 that my career objectives and IBM's plans for my career were no longer the same. I had a mainly good experience since 1984 until then.
I blame Sam Palmisano, and just didn't see Ginny Rometti doing anything different when she took over. A good career decision of mine at the time, with the wisdom of hindsight. Now I'm retired and will take my IBM pension when I'm 63 in a few years.
if only IBM had bought into cloud early, you know, they could have bought a leader in Hybrid Cloud like Softlayer...
oh, wait..
that was under Ginni's watch, and she never spent a cent on datacenter, in fact she cut spending there, while all the competition, like Amazon & Microsoft were spending like crazy.
Too late Arvind, that ship has sailed.
IBM is a big place.
There are some IBMers I'd trust.
But its a small number.
The bigger issue is that IBM isn't the thought leader.
They are the vendor of last choice for customers who want leading edge solutions that don't come with a gi-normous price tag because of the bloat.
"We all must be obsessed with continually delighting our clients. At every interaction, we must strive to offer them the best experience and value. The only way to lead in today’s ever-changing marketplace is to constantly innovate according to what our clients want and need."
1) Stop being obsessed with money (sure, make a profit, but not at the expense of quality of service)
2) Stop pissing them off with sub-standard support. SME should *mean* an SME.
3) They want what they paid for - give it to them instead of excuses why you can't
4) The "best experience and value" would suggest having experienced people to provide such value. Difficult to do when all the experienced staff are made redundant (back to money again)
What a pile of meaningless old bollocks!!! Lots of talk but no actual strategy.
IBM won't get anywhere if they don't start realising that the front-line staff are still the most important people. Not the 768,000 layers of white-collar dead wood between them and the CEO.
"total disconnect from that customers want and the coal-face staff"
I'm not sure he's that bad. He's not a robot, unlike Ginny. What is positive is that he actually understands the technology, which the past several CEOs haven't. He might just save the company.
Still, I'm glad I sold my shares a while back.
Here in my local market IBM is a joke.
Their 5 years gigs are coming to an end so they are being kicked out and replaced with a more nimble Tier 2 player. All of their extravagant promises have never been fulfilled with a procession of people being steadily replaced by India-based employees with a stunning level of ignorance of the product and business. Remember - the really good Indian Developers/Specialists have already left for the US/UK/Australia/NZ. I should know; I've employed many of them.
If we go back 5 plus years the local IBM was a very different place - I worked alongside some quality people then at customers who were a pleasure to deal with. Needless to say all have since left IBM, mostly not by choice.
At a Federal level they are still a big player but their recent performance has not exactly been stellar but scale is what matters at that level not quality.
I worked for IBM for several years, not that long since they told me my time was up. Sounds like very little has changed, rearrange old words into something that looks modern - but don't make any meaningful change. Growth mindset is a worthy concept but IBM will (a) call it something else internally - probably with multiple iterations and (b) produce some crap online training that staff have to tick a few boxes to become grand masters at. What needs to change but won't is the culture: the only maniacal focus they have is on dollars (share price). Resources (never called p**ple internally) don't even come a distant 99th. I learnt loads of good tech stuff at IBM, I also learnt some less than good stuff, especially how not to get the best out of people - which IBM proved surprisingly adept at. I can't see a career IBMer changing the culture, it's far more likely they will setlle for walking away with a bucketful of cash in a few years' time.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
