IBM's CEO Virginia Rometty to be replaced by its cloud, Red Hat chiefs
If anyone was still wondering how serious IBM is about being a major cloud player that question was resoundly answered this week when its current cloud and cognitive-software leader Arvind Krishna and Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst to be CEO and president, respectively, to replace long-time CEO Virginia Rometty.
Krishna, 57, was a principal architect of IBM’s $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat last year and is currently IBM’s senior vice president of Cloud and Cognitive Software, which has become the company’s palpable future.
The Red Hat acquisition not only made Big Blue a bigger open-source and enterprise-software player, but mostly it got IBM into the lucrative hybrid-cloud business, targeting huge cloud competitor Google, Amazon and Microsoft among others. Gartner says that market will be worth $240 billion by next year.