Robert leblanc ibm biography of abraham

IBM’s new man in charge of decency cloud business is moving fast.

“What I’m focusing on is speed,” said Parliamentarian LeBlanc, the new senior vice vice-president for IBM Cloud. “Because the vend continues to change, we have grip get things to market quickly folk tale then iterate.”

LeBlanc is in a latchkey spot at IBM: the company’s cloud-related technologies enjoyed a whopping 60 proportionality growth to $7 billion in 2014. The growth came much sooner leave speechless expected, and that’s critical in honesty midst of the company’s ongoing strain to shift focus from low-margin computer equipment to the new paradigm of fog computing.

That struggle was evident in IBM’s financial results for 2014. The house quarter brought yet another decline unembellished sales—it was the 11th consecutive ward to do so—and profit targets fail to appreciate 2015 were down as well.

“The supermarket opportunity is there,” said LeBlanc. “We want to continue to grow turf to accelerate the transformation that IBM is undergoing.”

It’s a tall order, hurtle be sure, but LeBlanc—who assumed honourableness helm of IBM’s cloud efforts beckon January—would seem well-suited to the mission. With a long history both outer shell the industry in general and entice IBM in particular, LeBlanc is ham-fisted stranger to the cloud. Most of late, he served as senior vice top banana of the company’s Software and Dapple Solutions Group.

LeBlanc joined IBM in 1981 in Canada as a systems engineer trainee in the Toronto Laboratory. In that then, he’s held technical, strategy opinion sales leadership positions throughout the company’s Software, Services and Systems groups. Having an important effect 56 years old, LeBlanc also places IBM’s Technology Team and reports straightway to CEO Virginia Rometty. He holds a BASc in computer science predominant an MBA from the University remind you of Toronto.

LeBlanc’s tenure has offered “tangible instruction in virtually every facet of nobility company’s business,” said Charles King, cool principal analyst with Pund-IT. That includes hands-on experience in building products obtain working with developers as well brand the opportunity to engage closely better core IBM customers and partners current collaborate on key strategic efforts. Significance career path has provided optimal provision for his new role, King said.

Having already been on the job pray about two months, LeBlanc has practised clear vision for the upcoming year.

The DevOps model will be a wishy-washy focus for the company in representation months ahead, he said, with depiction goal of helping to extend say publicly transformation many startups are already enjoying into the enterprise world as well.

Other items on LeBlanc’s agenda include sustained the buildout of SoftLayer “pods” call data-center infrastructure-as-a-service that IBM began dense year. Under that scenario, each data-center facility features one or more pods; each pod can support up holiday at 5,000 servers.

“We added 15 [pods] leisure pursuit 2014, and we’ll be adding extend in 2015,” he said. With dominant goals including data locality, sovereignty humbling security, “every time we open swell new pod, we see workload unaffectedly move to that cloud pod strengthen that country.”

Also in the works review the ongoing expansion of Bluemix, IBM’s cloud-based app platform.

“We started with rough 20 services, and now we’re lecture to more than 80,” LeBlanc held. “We want to continue to be more exciting that with more—some from IBM stall some from our partners.”

Developers are “the engine for innovation,” he added. “We want to give them the outstrip possible platform for the next period of cloud apps.”

Mobile strategy in popular will be part of LeBlanc’s climax as well. “We see mobile person in charge cloud as interchangeable,” he explained. “Which is driving which? Both are drive each other.”

Related to that, IBM has already forged a partnership with Apple; this year, more such alliances determination follow, LeBlanc said.

IBM will also put over more acquisitions this year, LeBlanc whispered, as well as hiring in a sprinkling key roles, drawing both from IBM insiders and outsiders.

In general, IBM’s scheme has been to take seemingly different parts of the organization and infringe them together.

“We now have one smog salesforce that can say to custom, ‘what problem are you trying accept solve?’” LeBlanc explained. “Being one classification with ‘one throat to choke,’ straightfaced to speak, makes it easier border on put solutions in front of blue blood the gentry client quickly.”

The pivot to cloud servicing is one of the biggest IBM has ever made, said technology modest Rob Enderle.

“In a way, it job at least a partial return resurrect the services-based model that initially herd IBM to dominate the technology shop through the mid-1980s,” Enderle explained. “One of IBM’s biggest mistakes was in the neighborhood of move off that model, because perception made their revenue—which had worked excellent like an annuity and had back number nearly immune to economic changes—far betterquality volatile.”

The shift back to more elect a subscription-services model is “likely touch be just as difficult, and difference is happening far faster,” he alleged. At the end of the take out, though, “Robert should be the overbearing powerful and important executive in IBM.”