How do you plan to drive growth in the Middle East market?
We’re here because there’s so much transformation and innovation going on in this part of the world. We see the cloud taking off here, specifically the hybrid cloud. Every customer I meet talks about two things – cloud and modernisation. It’s even more pronounced here.
What is Kyndryl’s advantage?
I like to think it’s two things. We’re a startup. But we’re a startup with 90,000 people and 4000 plus customers and decades and decades of experience in delivering mission-critical applications. As our chairman said, we are ready to support the hearts and lungs of the world’s vital infrastructure. So it is that scale and expertise coupled with our freedom of action that sets us apart. We were part of IBM, and of course, we were biased towards IBM. Now what we are biased toward is the needs of our customers.
You are building an ecosystem by forging partnerships with tech powerhouses such as Microsoft, AWS, VMware, etc. Can you share us with the strategy behind this?
It’s to go from predominantly an IBM portfolio to a portfolio that includes the full spectrum of solutions by forming strategic alliances with other tech giants. You’ll see us start to integrate both our capabilities and their capabilities more together. The other thing you’re going to see us do is to improve our people’s skills. I’m very proud of the fact that we’ve increased the certification levels of our people manifold. It’s one of those unique things where it’s a win-win situation. It’s a win for our employees because they put their skills to improve their value, and they’re more involved and engaged. It’s a win for our customers because we bring more value to them. Especially here in the Middle East, we want to build up the capabilities of the people who live here or work here. We want to build up that capability by bringing in expertise from around the world.
The IT services market is already a bit crowded. How do you plan to stand out?
There are a lot of worthy competitors out there, and will always be. What works in our favour are two things. Number one is we bring speed and agility coupled with global scale. I think that gives us an advantage over some of the bigger competitors. In addition, we’ve doubled the total addressable marketplace with what we’re going to go after. Second is delivery operations around the world. My division alone as an enterprise has capabilities in over 50 countries. So when we’re talking with a customer and if they need help in Turkey, Egypt, Saudi, or the UAE, we can deliver that because we have a presence. And also, some of the global partnerships we’re forming are unique, and not everybody has that strategy.
What is your addressable market?
Our total addressable market is around $500 billion, and before the IBM spin-off, it was about half of that. We are moving into new areas like data and AI and hyperscalers, where we weren’t allowed to play before.
How do you plan to transform your service delivery model?
In two ways. One is the skills- we are very people-intensive and capitalise on almost 90,000 employees worldwide. So it’s to scale them up and give them the tools and capabilities. The second is that we’re introducing more automation to our customers. This will help us free up our people so that instead of handling very mundane tasks, they can now upscale and move into the hot areas for our customers. So that’s where we see our ability to deliver uniquely versus many other companies.
Are you targeting any particular industry sectors here?
Yeah, we haven’t targeted a specific industry or sector. But we are very strong in financial services institutions, telecom, and transportation. We also have a lot of presence in the mining, industrial and retail sectors. Most of the needs of our customers in these areas are not specific to the industry. However, we will bring industry specialisation as we move into the new areas. But that’s probably down the road a little bit.
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