International Business Machines (IBM) has named IITian Arvind Krishna as Chief Executive Officer, replacing long-time CEO Virginia Rometty. Krishna, 57, who spearheaded the Red Hat deal, will take over in April.
Krishna joined IBM in 1990 and has an undergraduate degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, and a PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
IBM will likely continue its trajectory under Krishna, but may pursue more small acquisitions in the cloud and analytics space, said Tim Hubbard, Assistant Professor at the University of Notre Dame and a former IBM consultant.
Virginia Rometty will step down on April 6 but will continue as the Executive Chairman till the end of the year, when she will retire after almost 40 years with the company, IBM said in a statement.
Arvind Krishna’s appointment as Head of the global IT giant adds to the growing list of Indian-origin executives at the helm of some of the biggest multinational companies.
Krishna joins the club that includes Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, MasterCard CEO Ajay Banga, PepsiCo’s former CEO Indra Nooyi and Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen.
