While previous IBM CEOs had led the 109-year old company through world wars, market crashes, and even the 1918 global pandemic, Krishna assumed his post smack in the middle of both a new pandemic and a market crash that many fear could lead to another recession.
"They kind of lost their way for the past decade," Thomas Hayes, chairman of private equity firm Great Hill Partners, told Business Insider.The strategy, which Krishna had been leading even before he was named successor to ex-CEO Ginni Rometty in January, is focused on another trend called hybrid cloud, in which businesses set up networks on both public clouds and in-house data centers.
Here are the 12 top IBM executives on Krishna's team who are expected to play a critical role in the company's comeback bid: "You get the benefit of a deeply ingrained insider who's smart in the form of Krishna. And you get somebody who was more or less born and bred from outside the organization. Maybe you get the best of both worlds.": Senior Vice President of global markets
Paul Cormier was one of the first employees of Red Hat, the pioneering open source software company, which IBM bought for $34 billion last year.Although he was initially worried about IBM acquiring Red Hat, Cormier is a believer in Krishna's view that hybrid cloud is the future of enterprise tech. Howard Boville, who just joined from Bank of America where he was chief technology officer, is in charge of IBM's global network of cloud data centers.Howard Boville joined IBM last week as a senior vice president of the company's cloud platform.