It’s taken the company a century to get there, but IBM finally has a woman in the top job, following the announcement that Virginia (‘Ginni’) Rometty is to succeed Sam Palmisano as CEO at the beginning of next year. Palmisano will remain chairman in what I believe is the first time the top roles have been split. Rometty currently heads IBM’s global sales and marketing.
I know nothing about Rometty. Mind you, she probably knows nothing about me, but that doesn’t mean I’m not a nice person. Rometty’s credentials show her leading various big chunks of IBM, including Global Solutions (where Logica’s new UK CEO, Gary Bullard last worked before leaving IBM for BT – see here) at the time of the PwC Consulting acquisition. So it sounds like she knows her way around a soup-to-nuts IT giant, arguably more so than HP’s new CEO, Meg Whitman. But that she first must prove.
By the way, I take some quiet satisfaction from noting that Rometty started her career at IBM – as did I – as a Systems Engineer. Techies rule, OK!