IBM Shakes Up Its Public Cloud Leadership

IBM's David Kenny talking with Box CEO Aaron Levie at a Box conference in August. Photo by Bloomberg

One of IBM’s top cloud executives quietly departed the company a few weeks ago, amid a broader shakeup of the tech giant’s cloud management team. The changes follow IBM losing market share in the public cloud, where it had hoped to expand.

IBM was overtaken by Alibaba in the first quarter for the fourth spot in the global market, according to Synergy Research, putting it far behind behind Amazon Web Services and Microsoft, as well as No. 3 rival Google. IBM has been trying to grow market share in the public cloud to offset uneven sales of mainframe computers, a hardware market that has shrunk as more companies move their computing to the public cloud.