Ginni Rometty’s First Few Days Running IBM Have Been Busy
Ginni Rometty has had a busy couple of days to start off her stint as IBM’s new CEO.
Today, Big Blue closed its first acquisition of the Rometty era, announcing a deal to buy privately held Green Hat, a company that specializes in software for conducting quality tests on software applications for the cloud. It’s small enough that IBM didn’t disclose financial terms. Green Hat dates to 1996 and is based in London and Wilmington, Del. Its main stock in trade is to simplify the capital- and labor-intensive job of testing software applications by moving the entire process to the cloud. Once the deal closes, Green Hat will become part of IBM’s Rational Software business unit.
And if acquisitions weren’t enough, there have been some promotions too. As first reported by Bloomberg News, which obtained an internal memo, Rometty named Bruno Di Leo as senior vice president of sales and distribution and Bridget Van Kralingen as new senior vice president of IBM Global Business Services, IBM’s consulting arm. Van Kralingen is replacing Frank Kern, who is retiring after 35 years at IBM.
Di Leo is a native of Peru, and joined IBM in 1975. His last job was running the high-profile growth markets unit, which specializes in business in the BRIC countries — Brazil, Russia, India and China. James Bramante was named as his replacement and will be based in Shanghai. The job is an important one as IBM has set a goal of boosting its revenue in these markets to 30 percent of sales by 2015.
