IBM has named Arvind Krishna as its new chief executive officer, replacing longtime CEO Virginia Rometty.
Krishna is currently associated with IBM as the Head of it’s cloud and cognitive software unit and was a chief architect of the company’s acquisition of Red Hat, which completed last year. Rometty will continue to hold the position of an executive chairman and serve till the end of the year.
Rometty is soon retiring from IBM after 40 years. She became IBM’s first female CEO in 2012, and had led the company’s stint on the market for hybrid cloud, which allows businesses to store data on both private and public cloud networks run by rivals such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Corp.’s Azure.
“Arvind is the right CEO for the next era at IBM. He is a brilliant technologist who has played a significant role in developing our key technologies such as artificial intelligence, cloud, quantum, computing and Blockchain. He is also a superb operational leader,” CEO Rometty said in a statement.
Krishna had studied at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur and holds a PhD in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois. He joined IBM in 1990.
