Let’s get one thing straight right off the bat. If someone has been named president of International Business Machines Corporation, it means they ar

The Future IBM We Will Probably Never See

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2021-07-09 11:00:05

Let’s get one thing straight right off the bat. If someone has been named president of International Business Machines Corporation, it means they are the heir apparent and future chief executive officer of what used to be the world’s largest IT supplier and, with prior presidents, actually was the world’s largest IT supplier. Which is why the announcement of the departure of Jim Whitehurst from IBM on the Friday before the Independence Day holiday in America started was such a surprise.

That someone is very likely current CEO Arvind Krishna, who was given that role back in January 2021, when the company’s board of directors also named Whitehurst president. Whitehurst came to IBM after being CEO at Red Hat, the open source software giant – the only open source software giant if you want to be precise – that IBM paid $34 billion to acquire in October 2018. Perhaps Krishna, who is 59 and already coming up against the traditional retirement age of 60 for IBM’s chairman and CEO, has decided that he is best to run Big Blue and that the person who ran Red Hat for more than a dozen years, who was chief operating officer for Delta Air Lines for six years (covering ops as a well as the CIO role), who was a partner at the Boston Consulting Group for a dozen years, and who got a double major in computer science and economics from Rice University and an MBA from Harvard University, is not.

To be fair, that someone who forgot the meaning of the president title at IBM could have been the company’s board, it could have been the executive management at Big Blue, or it could have been Whitehurst himself. Or maybe all four at once.