In this vendor ranking segment from the Acceleration Economy course The Cloud Wars Top 10: How It Works, Why It Has Shifted, & How CXOs Use It, I share three innovations IBM CEO Arvind Krishna has driven to modernize IBM and earn its spot as #9 on the Cloud Wars Top 10 ranking.
This episode is sponsored by Acceleration Economy’s “Cloud Wars Top 10 Course,” which explains how Bob Evans builds and updates the Cloud Wars Top 10 ranking, as well as how C-suite executives use the list to inform strategic cloud purchase decisions. The course is available today.
Highlights
In the three years since Arvind Krishna debuted as IBM CEO (at the start of the pandemic), he has done three things that have made IBM a key player in the cloud market:
- Streamlined IBM’s business to put the customer at the center and make it easier to do business with the company
- Refocused how IBM wants to be seen, not as a hardware maker, but as a hybrid cloud vendor with a compelling story to tell the outside world
- Built off its 50 years of history with artificial intelligence (AI) to tie its AI capabilities to what customers want and need.
IBM needs to continue moving faster to keep up with how quickly the market and customer needs are changing. What IBM does best is combine industry expertise with its still-incredible technology. Not many years ago, IBM was eager to compete with AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft, and now it has billion-dollar partnership businesses with them. IBM’s deep and powerful partners ecosystem, which includes other members of the Cloud Wars Top 10, has become a strategic differentiator.
