New Business Models, New Infrastructure Solutions

Q: How has Kyndryl refined its commercial offer and scaled up since spinning off from IBM IT Infrastructure Services in November 2021?

A: At an organizational level, Kyndryl’s objective is to effectively communicate and outline the company’s commercial business strategy and services portfolio. As an enterprise, our first priority is providing our customer base with continued excellent services and to nurture our relationships with clients.

This is followed by expanding our business model into new market opportunities beyond three practices: Cloud Services, Core Enterprise and zCloud and Digital Workplace Services. After spinning off from IBM, we began to consider how Kyndryl would provide additional value to our clients, which led to the development of three new practices: Applications, Data and AI, Cybersecurity and Resilience; and Network and Edge. Expanding into this market space represents an additional US$1.9 billion in annual revenue, nearly double the revenue opportunity we had before. This is part of the global trend created by the digital transformation, inflating Kyndryl’s addressable market from $240 billion to $510 billion by 2024.

The final element of our strategic growth has and will continue to be nurturing and forming new strategic alliances. As part of IBM, we were restricted to building and problem-solving using its products and services. As an independent organization, we have strengthened our value proposition by tailoring our solutions to a more expansive portfolio that includes Microsoft, Google and AWS. 

Q: How has the digital transformation changed what modern digital infrastructure should look like in 2022?

A: The past two years have undoubtedly uprooted traditional processes and approaches across industrial sectors, paving the way for new business models and digital-first solutions. Since time-to-market has proved to be crucially important for market capture, every single company is interested in accelerating the development of a modern digital infrastructure. Altogether, this has created new needs and requirements related to digital infrastructure, applications, management and business processes. 

This has been particularly relevant for industrial sectors like banking and retail, which experienced acute hypergrowth during the pandemic. Under normal sociopolitical and macroeconomic conditions, companies would have likely met organic growth with increasing on-premise infrastructure capacity. Instead, under the urgency to meet end-consumer demand, companies saw themselves obligated to defer to cloud-based solutions to supplement their data storage and process capacity. This strategy was central to analyzing and identifying consumption patterns so our clients could reorient themselves accordingly, which is a significant market advantage. 

Q: Cybersecurity has become a focal point for Mexican enterprises, how does Kyndryl provide unique added value in this market space?

A: Kyndryl’s market advantage rests on the fact that we are already running the digital infrastructures of large enterprises across multiple industries, so we already have a complete understanding of our clients’ operational needs. While we continue to build up our independent capabilities and services in this market area, we are working with different partners to foment the total-added value of our security services and solutions. In practical terms, this equates to shifting the structure of our security solutions from a basic security operations center to consulting services, which entails a complete understanding of our client’s infrastructure, application and network vulnerabilities. This is followed by continued risk-management and identification of opportunities that will mitigate risks according to each industry sector. 

Q: What objectives does the company look to accomplish in 2022 and how will it be measuring its success?

A: Kyndryl’s running objective for 2022 will be to lay a foundation for growth in the Mexican market, which involves three parallel campaigns. Our main priority is to foster our base client’s satisfaction in the company’s services and solutions through the delivery of resilient and optimal infrastructures. Second will be to refine the three new market opportunities Kyndryl recently ventured into as a means of expanding our existing services and solutions portfolio. Finally, we are working diligently on building our alliance and ecosystem network in Mexico to provide a greater added-value to our clients.