Dive Brief:
- IT infrastructure provider Kyndryl appointed Kim Basile as its CIO Tuesday. Basile served as the company’s VP of IT transformation and strategy since May 2022 and was previously head of global enterprise security for financial services advisory Vanguard.
- Basile succeeds Michael Bradshaw, who was named Kyndryl's SVP and global practice leader for applications, data and AI. Bradshaw joined Kyndryl as CIO in May 2021, six months before the company separated from IBM.
- As part of the midyear move to shore up its tech executive suite, Kyndryl also appointed Nicolas Sekkaki as global practice leader for cloud. Sekkaki served as applications, data and AI practice leader for almost three years. He takes on a position left vacant by the death of Harish Grama in December.
Dive Insight:
Kyndryl emerged from the IBM spinoff with a global leadership position in infrastructure services and its own modernization hurdles to clear.
As the company inched toward post-split profitability, Bradshaw’s team raced against the clock to untangle Kyndryl’s tech stack from IBM’s legacy systems by last year’s Nov. 3 deadline.
The company completed the decoupling on schedule, migrating 1,800 applications to an all-cloud infrastructure in two years.
Bradshaw described the modernization sprint as “an existential challenge” in an interview with CIO Dive last year.
Prior to joining Kyndryl, Bradshaw wrestled with technical debt as a CIO at NBCUniversal and Lockheed Martin and spent more than two decades working in infrastructure at IBM. He will now lead a growing segment of Kyndryl’s portfolio.
“We're seeing revenue growth opportunities associated with both AI and genAI,” Kyndryl Chairman and CEO Martin Schroeter said during a May earnings call. “Revenue in our applications data and AI practice grew double digits this past fiscal year.”
The company integrated its Kyndryl Bridge platform with Nvidia compute and software solutions, according to a May announcement.
As Basile brings her cybersecurity experience to the CIO role, Bradshaw will put his enterprise transformation expertise into practice on the customer side of the business, the company said in Tuesday’s announcement.
“Michael will work in close partnership with Kyndryl Consult, our strategic alliance partners and our other practices to prioritize and focus on helping customers modernize their complex technology environments and implement AI,” the company said.
The leadership reshuffle comes as Kyndryl enters the first quarter of its fiscal year. The provider joins a number of large companies, including Citi, JPMorgan and BNY, in onboarding technology executives. The changes also align with Kyndryl’s plan to move toward profitability.
“As we start our new fiscal year, we have pivoted from transformation to growth,” Schroeter said in a May earnings release. “We’re now targeting an earlier return to revenue growth, in the fourth quarter of this fiscal year.”
The company reported a pretax loss of $168 million for the fiscal year, down from $851 million in FY2023.
