Welcome to the Cloud Wars Minute — your daily cloud news and commentary show. Each episode provides insights and perspectives around the “reimagination machine” that is the cloud.
In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I’m giving a preview of my interview with IBM CEO Arvind Krishna, which included a discussion of the importance of trust and innovation in complex IT landscapes.
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Highlights
00:14 — Arvind Krishna is about to enter his fifth year as CEO of IBM. He joined at the beginning of April 2020. It was a confused company. What was IBM focusing on? Where was it headed? Krishna has done a terrific job, in my opinion, in getting a lot of that cleared out over the last four years.
01:04 — In the conversation we had recently, he focused on, “Now, how are we going to go to market? How are we going to dazzle our customers?” He said for 112 years, IBM’s thing has been , “How do we serve our clients?” In the past, it was through a lot of products and technology sales.
01:48 — Its clients have very complex IT environments, and IBM says, “We’ll own the problem with you. We’ll come in, no questions, we’ll get it fixed with you.” I think it’s the sort of thing that business leaders want to hear today. Along with that, Krishna talked about this notion of experiential selling with clients and partners.
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03:05 — One example was with an energy client, FuelCell Energy. IBM was able to display and deliver to this client expertise across several areas in material science expertise. IBM asked the client to share its deep artificial intelligence (AI) expertise so it could deliver for it. The notion of trust is key in what it’s doing.
04:31 — In an example of working differently with partners, Krishna said that big hyperscalers, particularly Microsoft and AWS, instead of banging heads directly against them, competing, it’s built partnerships with those and many other of the Cloud Wars Top 10 companies.
05:21 —We have the full-length video interview with Krishna, and then also later this morning, we’ll be posting my full-length analytical article about IBM and the conversation I had with Krishna.
- Watch the Arvind Krishna video interview
- Read my analytical article about IBM and Arvind Krishna’s outlook for 2024
