Arvind Krishna

Arvind Krishna (born 1962) is an Indian-American business executive, and the chairman and CEO of IBM. He has been CEO of IBM since April 2020 and chairman since January 2021. Krishna began his career at IBM in 1990, at its Thomas J. Watson Research Center, and was promoted to senior vice president in 2015, managing IBM Cloud & Cognitive Software and IBM Research divisions. He was a principal architect of the acquisition of Red Hat, the largest acquisition in the company’s history.

Early life and education
Krishna was born into a Telugu-speaking family in West Godavari District in the Coastal Andhra region of Andhra Pradesh, India. His father, Major General Vinod Krishna, was an army officer who served in the Indian Army and his mother, Aarathi Krishna, worked for the welfare of Army widows.

Krishna received his education at Stanes Anglo Indian Higher Secondary School, Coonoor, Tamil Nadu and at St Joseph's Academy, Dehradun before receiving a BTech degree in electrical engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur in 1985. He subsequently moved to the United States to earn a PhD in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 1991. He is the recipient of distinguished alumni awards from both IIT Kanpur and the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign.

Professional career
Krishna joined IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center in 1990, and continued in Watson Research for 18 years until 2009. Thereafter, he held a General Manager role in Information management software and systems and technology group of IBM. In 2015, he was promoted to senior vice president of IBM Research. He later became senior vice president of IBM's cloud and cognitive software division.

Krishna also led the building and expansion of new markets for IBM in artificial intelligence, cloud, quantum computing, and blockchain technology. He was a driving force behind IBM's $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat, which closed in July 2019.

He was appointed IBM's CEO in January 2020, effective April 6, 2020, succeeding Ginni Rometty who was CEO since 2012. He joined Satya Nadella, Shantanu Narayen, and Sundar Pichai as an Indian-American CEO of a major United States technology company. In 2021, he was named by CRN as the year's "Most Influential Executive".

Research
He has co-authored 15 patents, has been the editor of IEEE and ACM journals, and has published extensively in technical journals.