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IBM CEO Ginni Rometty Sharpens Focus on Emerging Tech for Business


ORLANDO, Fla. — For most companies, the start and endpoints of any major strategic shift are the easy part, it’s the middle that can make or break a business, says Ginni Rometty, president and chief executive officer of International Business Machines Corp.

How does she know? It’s a journey IBM itself embarked on over six years ago, when Ms. Rometty took on the top job at the technology firm, which traces its origins to the late-19th Century.

Speaking to chief information officers and other senior enterprise IT managers gathered here for Gartner’s annual IT industry conference, Ms. Rometty outlined the many ways IBM has shifted within the enterprise technology market in recent years, as businesses across all industries ramp up their use of cloud computing, big data, artificial intelligence, blockchain and other emerging digital tools.

“This has clearly been the time of rapid change,” Ms. Rometty said, “and it isn’t going to stop.”

Her remarks Tuesday came ahead of IBM’s third-quarter earnings, which the company is set to report after markets close at the end of the day.

Analysts surveyed by S&P Global Market Intelligence are expecting a decline in revenue, to $19.04 billion from $19.15 billion over the same period a year ago, following three consecutive quarters of growth. Amid ups and downs, revenue has been shrinking over the past six years.

Over that time, Ms. Rometty has led the company’s re-positioning from selling workhorse legacy IT tools, to focusing on growth markets and emerging digital tools, like cloud, AI, quantum computing and blockchain. She predicted that blockchain would have an impact on business in five years and urged companies to prioritize their preparation now.

In her first two years as CEO, she said, “we could see the market was changing and we needed to change faster,” taking a cue from the agility of tech startups: “I think we learned a lot from startup companies,” she added.

And while the consumer tech market is booming, Ms. Rometty said, as a company, “you have to decide what you are and what you are not, and we are not a direct to consumer company.” AI for business is different, she said. The big challenge, in her view, isn’t technology, but change management. Beyond that, AI for business must be explainable and adjusted for bias, and be able to scale. Also, it is often domain-specific, focused on a particular problem or set of data. It is crucial that companies that provide AI to enterprises safeguard data from their customers’ rivals in the market.

“I really believe we are the leader in AI for business. Our specialization is to know what it takes for the enterprise to operate in the world,” Ms. Rometty said.

This week alone in the enterprise space, IBM launched a new multi-cloud tool designed to help firms manage a growing number of apps and workloads spread across different cloud environments, regardless of vendor.

It also released similar AI technology that allows the deployment of AI models, regardless of vendor or cloud platform, along with new security tools.

Each of the tools seeks to address a lack of interoperability among many emerging technology systems, even as businesses increasingly take a mix-and-match approach to IT, Ms. Rometty said.

IBM’s corporate customers on average operate with six clouds and roughly one thousand apps, according to Ms. Rometty. “That’s the context when we think of cloud,” she said.

With those capabilities in place, AI increasingly will take on a key role in the way businesses make decisions about services and products in the years ahead. IBM already has some 25,000 AI engagements with customers, Ms. Rometty said.

The broader goal is to offer end-to-end enterprise tech capabilities, with the common currency being data, she said.

“Data will be at the heart of these disruptions for a long time,” Ms. Rometty said.



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