Tell me about Kyndryl

IBM has finally come up with a name for its spin-off company. And that name is Kyndryl. Like many people, I assume you may be wondering how they came up with the name. Wasn’t NewCo good enough? I don’t know how much they spent on the name, but it works this way. The ‘Kyn’ part of the name is, apparently, taken from the word kinship and references the idea that relationships with people are at the centre of the strategy. The ‘Dryl’ part comes from tendril, and references new growth. And the thinking behind that is that together with customers and partners, the company helps advance human progress. So, now you know.

Martin Schroeter, the CEO of Kyndryl, says: “Kyndryl evokes the spirit of true partnership and growth. Customers around the world will come to know Kyndryl as a brand that runs the vital systems at the heart of progress, and an independent company with the best global talent in the industry.”

You’ll remember that IBM decided to separate its Managed Infrastructure Services business into the separate company, which it originally called NewCo. And this new company, Kyndryl, is expected to be completely separate from IBM by the end of this year.

As well as Martin Schroeter, other members of staff have been announced including Elly Keinan as Group President, Maria Bartolome Winans as Chief Marketing Officer, Una Pulizzi as global head of corporate affairs, and Edward Sebold as General Counsel. They are hoping to make Kyndryl a global leader in the management and modernization of IT infrastructure. The company will be headquartered in New York City.

The new company also released its corporate logo, which some people on social media have suggested used a font and a colour that is reminiscent of Amdahl’s old logo.

The other big question mark hanging over the company is how successful it can be. Clearly, some people are suggesting, if IBM thought that it would makes lots of money in the foreseeable future, they wouldn’t have spun it off – they would have kept it in house as a revenue centre.

From IBM’s point of view, it looks like their thinking is to focus more on cloud services and away from its older focus on enterprise hardware. They want to be known for leadership in hybrid cloud applications and artificial intelligence.

It’s anticipated that Kyndryl will have 90,000 employees, 4,600 big enterprise clients in 115 countries, a backlog of $60 billion in business “and more than twice the scale of its nearest competitor” in the area of infrastructure services. Also, the managed infrastructure services unit is a $19 billion business in terms of annual revenues. So, clearly the company has plenty to keep it going, at least over the next few years.

So, what exactly are managed infrastructure services? Basically, they are a range of managed services based around mainframes and digital transformation related to it. As well as things like testing and assembly, there’s also product engineering and lab services, and there are other bits and pieces that make up the portfolio. It doesn’t include IBM’s server business.

What else will Kyndryl do? Because it’s independent, it’s expects to form alliances with a wide range of partners and build its business that way. The company is suggesting that it will design, run, and manage the most modern, efficient, and reliable technology infrastructure for the world’s most important businesses and organizations, with the industry’s most experienced services experts.

Kyndryl may have chosen an unusual name as a way of drawing the attention of people to it. Like all good advertising, a memorable brand name encourages people to buy their products and ser-vices. The company seems to have a large customer base on launch, which means it should be successful in the immediate future. And the idea of forming alliances with other companies means that it can do things IBM, perhaps, couldn’t. And so that also augers well for its future.