IBM Elects Indian-Origin Arvind Krishna As New CEO

IBM has elected Indian-origin Arvind Krishna its new CEO, who will be heading the company now. He will be succeeding Virginia Rometty. Krishna will lead as the CEO and member of the Board of Directors effective from April 6. Before being the CEO, he held the position of Senior Vice President for Cloud and Cognitive Software.

New IBM CEO

Virginia Rometty, 62, described Krishna as the "right CEO for the next era at IBM" and "well-positioned" to lead the company into the cloud and cognitive era. Rometty would be retiring at the end of the year after nearly 40 years of serving the International Business Machines. She will continue serving as the Executive Chairman of the Board until the end of the year.

Krishna, 57, joined IBM back in 1990. He earned his undergraduate degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. With the new leadership, the company will likely continue its trajectory and might also pursue small acquisitions in the cloud and analytics space.

The shares of IBM spiked five percent after the new CEO was announced. Krishna also said that he looks forward to working with the entire team of IBMers, Red Hatters, and the clients worldwide.

New IMB CEO Krishna now adds to the growing list of Indian-origin executives reigning some of the biggest tech companies in the world. Krishna now joins the executive club that includes Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, PepsiCo's former CEO Indra Nooyi, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen, and MasterCard CEO Ajay Banga.