new delhi indianorigin technology executive arvind krishna has been elected chief executive officer of american it giant ibm after a worldclass succession process succeeding virginia rometty who described him as the right ceo for the next era at ibm and wellpositioned to lead the company into the cloud and cognitive erathe ibm board of directors elected krishna as company ceo and member of the board of directors effective april 6 he will succeed rometty 62 who will retire after almost 40 years with the company at the end of the yearibm said the transition was the culmination of a lengthy succession process that began almost a year ago with rometty collaborating closely with the rest of the ibm boardbefore getting appointed as the ceo of ibm krishna was senior vice president cloud and cognitive software and held a series of research and business management roles he joined ibm in 1990 and has an undergraduate degree from the indian institute of technology kanpurthe company also said red hat ceo james whitehurst will become its presidentin his role krishna leads the ibm business unit that provides the cloud and data platform on which the companys clients build the future his responsibilities include ibm research ibm cloud and ibms security and cognitive applications businessesibm said krishna 57 whose title is senior vice president was a principal architect of ibms 34 billion acquisition of open source software company red hat among the biggest tech mergers in historyarvind leads the units strategy product design offering development marketing sales and service he also guides ibms overall strategy in core and emerging technologies including artificial intelligence quantum computing blockchain cloud platform services datadriven solutions and nanotechnologypreviously he was general manager of ibm systems and technology groups development and manufacturing organization responsible for developing and engineering advanced semiconductor materials through microprocessors servers and storage systemsprior to that arvind was general manager of ibm information management which included database information integration and big data software solutions he served as vice president of strategy for ibm software he also held several key technical roles in ibm software and ibm research where he pioneered ibms security software businessarvind has an undergraduate degree from the indian institute of technology kanpur iitk and a phd from the university of illinois at urbanachampaignhe is the recipient of distinguished alumni awards from iitk and the university of illinois is the coauthor of 15 patents has been the editor of ieee and acm journals and has published extensively in technical conferences and journalshe completed his schooling from st josephs academy dehra dunkrishnas appointment as head of the global it giant adds to the growing list of indianorigin executives at the helm of some of the biggest multinational companies krishna joins the club that includes microsoft ceo satya nadella google and alphabet ceo sundar pichai mastercard ceo ajay banga pepsicos former ceo indra nooyi and adobe ceo shantanu narayenshares of the company were up nearly 4 in extended trading they have lost about a quarter of their