IBM CEO Arvind Krishna's 'Deeply, Deeply Passionate' Plan To Make IBM-Red Hat No. 1 In Hybrid Cloud, AI

When EY Global Chairman and CEO Carmine Di Sibio broke bread with IBM Chairman and CEO Arvind Krishna last July at a luncheon meeting, the two companies were more "frenemies" than partners. It was not a great relationship," said Di Sibio. "We were more competing than we were friends." That all changed when Krishna laid out IBM's new partner ecosystem charge that was taking hold in the wake of IBM's blockbuster acquisition of Red Hat. "The message I got at lunch was IBM was changing, [going through a] transformation, and the Red Hat acquisition was a big piece of this," he said. Di Sibio was impressed and as a result has made a big bet on Krishna and IBM. Now, the New York-based $37.2 billion global consulting powerhouse is aiming to drive $1 billion in revenue from the IBM partnership over the next few years. Di Sibio said he has been heartened by the speed at which Krishna is driving the transformation at IBM. "IBM notoriously has been, I'll say, moving slower," he said. "I do think they have changed, and they are changing. I have confidence they are going to move fast." The Red Hat deal, in fact, has changed the "culture" at IBM and the ecosystem strategy for the better, said Di Sibio. "Their change in strategy really enabled us to have a different type of relationship," he said. Key to building a strong partnership has been Krishna's technology savvy as a leader, his partnership commitment and the trust that has developed between the two executives, said Di Sibio. "Arvind is pretty technical," he said. "I think he is the right choice for where their strategy is going as they move forward." Since that lunch meeting, EY and IBM have combined on a joint go-to-market plan centered on the IBM Financial Services Cloud, combining EY's financial consulting muscle with IBM's cloud prowess. The two companies also launched just two months ago EY Diligence Edge, an AI-enabled M&A due diligence platform hosted on IBM Cloud and supported by IBM Watson Discovery. EY had opportunities to use different cloud providers for EY Diligence Edge but chose IBM because of its hybrid cloud strategy and Watson AI technology as a "differentiator," said Di Sibio. He said the IBM technology is helping win M&A customers for EY. "I think Arvind is bringing IBM back to being an innovative technology company based on hybrid cloud," he said. The EY partnership is just one piece of Krishna's bold bet on partners with the company's biggest go-to-market change in three decades as part of his "maniacal focus" to make IBM the No. 1 provider of hybrid cloud and AI. "I think it's the biggest change we have made in our go-to-market [model] in my living memory," said Krishna, who started his career at IBM in 1990 as a researcher at its Thomas J. Watson Research Center. "If you think about how we pay our people and how we have got clarity on the partners, it is the single biggest change in 30 years on the go-to-market.