SVP and Director at IBM Research Arvind Krishna speaks on stage during the 2016 Wired Business Conference on June 16, 2016 in New York City.
Brian Ach | Getty Images
IBM shares jumped as much as 5% on Thursday after the company said Arvind Krishna is becoming CEO, replacing Ginni Rometty. The change is effective on April 6, according to a statement.
Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat’s former CEO, is becoming IBM’s president, the company said. IBM completed its $34 billion Red Hat acquisition in July.
Rometty, 62, became IBM president and CEO on January 1, 2012, and during her tenure the company’s stock has fallen about 26%. Rometty will remain the company’s executive chairman through the end of the year, IBM said, when she will retire after almost four decades at the company.
Under Rometty, IBM made cloud services a bigger priority, and it exited some businesses, including the low-end server unit it sold to Lenovo in 2014.
In a release, Rometty described Krishna as a “brilliant technologist who has played a significant role in developing our key technologies such as artificial intelligence, cloud, quantum computing and blockchain” as well as a “superb operational leader.”
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