Last year, Kyndryl spun off from the American giant IBM to better serve its clients and expand its services. Sven De Backer, managing director for the Luxembourg branch, tells us more about the spinoff and Kyndryl’s first steps in the grand duchy.
Kyndryl spun off from IBM’s IT infrastructure services in October 2021. In what way are you still connected to IBM and why was it necessary to spin off?
At IBM, we had one division called GTS that focussed on managed infrastructure services and it is this division which ended up becoming Kyndryl. Although IBM still formally has stake in Kyndryl – which they divest within 12 months after the spinoff – we are a completely independent company from them.
They do not have any seats or presence in the board of directors which helps us a lot and brings us a degree of freedom that we previously did not have and is necessary to support our clients. Providing hybrid cloud management services and helping our clients with their digital transformation projects requires a lot of skills and an extensive portfolio of clients that we inherited from our time at IBM.
However, now that we are independent from IBM, we have also been able to extend our ecosystem of partners and work with Azure and AWS for example, both of which we could not previously engage with. Our spinoff has really allowed us to provide the most comprehensive and high-quality services to our clients.
Among other things, you help organisations advance and accelerate in their Digital Transformation. Which areas of Digital Transformation do you focus on?
Our teams are grouped in five different skill domains: Cloud, Data and AI, Security and Resilience, Traditional Data Centre Skills and Digital Workerplace. From a corporate side, these are five different skills we invest in and are building incremental skills in to deliver the highest possible cloud management services to our portfolio of clients.
As Luxembourg is very much focused on financial services, three domains are especially relevant here. Firstly, cloud, specifically the hybrid part is something that we are working on with a lot of local clients. Secondly, nearly every client that we have talked to so far wants to upgrade their security and resilience. So, this is an area we have been working on expanding our skills and partnerships in Luxembourg. Lastly, mobile data and AI, as well as high-performance computing are all areas that a lot of our Luxembourgish clients come to us for.
In Autumn 2021 you joined Kyndryl as Managing Director in Luxembourg. What challenges have you had to overcome while setting up Kyndryl?
Next to increasing our partnerships and extending our skills in the areas I mentioned before, we also heavily invested in our A&S business which is our consulting and project service business. This arm of our business specifically focuses on advisory and implementation services.
A third challenge we have been working on is changing our organisation layout. This is something Kyndryl has been working on globally, not just in Luxembourg. Our new organisational catchphrase is: flat, fast and focussed – that’s what we encourage internally. What this means is that a lot of intermediate layers between corporate and local have been removed, which means that there is more delegation locally in the country. This allows us to move a lot faster in response to demands we get from our clients and focus on the solutions that they ask for.
With 90K employees and a combined total of 27K years of experience, you call yourself the “largest and oldest startup in the world”. In what ways do you still operate like a startup?
The change in delegation has really kept us nimble and everything feels a lot lighter. And that’s what I think is a large part of the startup mentality that we still feel and see in the company and in Luxembourg specifically.
Although we have been serving our clients for 30 years under IBM, we have had to build new HR, marketing and communications teams as well as build loads of other divisions from scratch. There was no brand, no logo, no website, there were just 90 000 of us creating things, which feels a little crazy if you’re in the middle of it. So, that also contributed to us feeling like a startup.
Now that you’ve settled in Luxembourg, what are your ambitions for the next 3 years in Luxembourg and beyond?
Now that a lot of the transformational activity is behind us, we can focus on gaining more traction in the market. We can already see this represented in the opportunities and additional volume on the market and the increased number of people reaching out to us.
In the next three years, we hope to serve all our clients who are shifting from traditional data centers to cloud infrastructure. While the skill sets required are constantly changing, we hope to become recognised as the go-to partner for our clients and provide them with the solutions they need. With the breadth of skills and services we provide, I believe this will be possible.
