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BUILDING AN ECOSYSTEM T
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OGRESS:
THE KYNDRYL WAY
JOSEPH TOMA, who leads the Alliances and Partnerships organisation at Kyndryl UK and Ireland, takes us on a journey of Kyndryl’s first six months as a newly independent, publicly traded company, and gives us an insight into the lessons learnt during those early days.
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s Kyndryl’s Alliances and Partnerships leader for the UK and Ireland, Joseph’s career background spans multiple continents, working in technology roles across Digital Consulting, Sales Leadership, and Ecosystem Building. In 2019, after IBM acquired Red Hat, Joseph was appointed the sales leader for Red Hat for the UK and Ireland. He remembers, “My first experience in building a successful partnership was our work in establishing the IBM and Red Hat relationship; working closely with Red Hat and their ecosystem of partners gave me a deep insight into the value partnerships can offer our customers. As time went on, and the formation of Kyndryl was announced, it organically made sense for me to continue this commitment to the ecosystem and to shift into a role responsible for building impactful relationships with a wide range of new partners.” In November 2021, Kyndryl became an independent publicly traded company.
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Simply put, Kyndryl is the leading technology services firm in the industry; bringing over 88,000 team members and 4,000+ enterprise customers with them. Customers are Kyndryl’s North Star. Joseph explains, “Kyndryl at its core has been founded on three key principles: 1. Our commitment to our customers, who continue to trust us to manage their mission critical systems. 2. Our commitment to our people to develop a flatter, faster, and more focused organisation, with a strong identity and culture. 3. Our commitment to our partners to be open, transparent and bold in our approach to partnership. “I encounter the validation of these commitments every single day in my role, interacting with customers, our teams and our partners. For our customers, we can now harnesses our new
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“The hyperscaler partnerships in particular will allow Kyndryl to grow our total addressable market globally from $250 billion to more than $510 billion”
freedom of action to address the real pent-up demand for technology choice, that in the past, we would have struggled to address. Being able to approach customer challenges with the full power of the ecosystem – to solve these challenges with agility, co-creation and innovation – is something we are seeing resonate across the UK and Ireland. Our customers need a trusted partner with the freedom and ability to design, implement and manage the best technology strategy to achieve their own long-term goals. Naturally, our teams are enthused and hugely energetic to bring this best-in-class approach to our customers, and our growing ecosystem of partners has really jumped on board with the Kyndryl story. 6
“Our first priority as an independent company was doubling down on this; we announced our partnership with Microsoft shortly after becoming independent, and this was quickly followed by Google Cloud and AWS. In our first 100 days as a new company, we signed agreements with NetApp, Dell, Pure Storage, VMWare, Nokia, SAP, Cloudera, and more. “The hyperscaler partnerships in particular will allow Kyndryl to grow
our total addressable market globally from $250 billion to more than $510 billion. We know this is exactly what our customers around the world need from us. In the UK and Ireland, we are already working with all of our customers to modernise and run their mission critical systems. Our customers here are the market leaders in financial services, telecommunications, media, entertainment, consumer products, and beyond. We are
fortunate that this list includes some very well-known enterprises: RSA Insurance in the UK, and Permanent TSB in Ireland.” Joseph says Kyndryl is founded on being flat (empowering and making teams accountable), fast (cultivating the ethos of simplicity), and focused (delivering exceptional services for customers), which are at the heart of everything it does. He continues, “It is interesting to see 7
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the benefits that becoming a faster, flatter, and more focused organisation bring to the fore. A big change was to remove the concept of having multi-tiered geography-based footprints and to form into 10 major countries around the world – this speeds up decision making, and importantly brings our top talent closer to our customers. To summarise the impact this has had, it means our teams are lean and have full empowerment to make quick decisions working sideby-side with our customers.” The advantages of being a new independent publicly traded company mean Kyndryl is more agile, it has the ability to form key partnerships, and it can address changes in culture and identity. Joseph says, “We are not only partnering with organisations to provide new technology, but we are also able to listen to customers and approach challenges that historically we were not being brought in to address – the level of innovation we can now provide has opened up the door for us on this. There 10
“We are not only partnering provide new technology, bu to customers and approach we were not being brought
g with organisations to ut we are also able to listen challenges that historically in to address” JOSEPH TOMA
has equally been a massive focus on the creation of our new culture, The Kyndryl Way. This change in identity and brand purpose has had a very positive impact on the teams.” Joseph talks about the Kyndryl Way as a vehicle for the business’ cultural transformation. He explains, “The Kyndryl Way is essentially our identity, principles and purpose that we aim to foster within Kyndryl. A key to this is listening and reflecting internally; we spent a lot of time collecting feedback from our teams to see what we were doing well and which areas we needed to improve on. “The big takeaway that I saw in the UK and Ireland was that a lot of our teams said that they place absolute trust in the people they work with, that they felt empowered to make bold decisions for customers, and that they have support from their management team to do so. A key element of this is placing people at the core of what we do; having empathy is critical, but also ensuring, as management, that we engage regularly to embed our culture into our customer and partnership approach. 11
The Kyndryl Way will evolve overtime, but this renewed purpose has made it clear that each and every one of us plays a part in advancing the vital systems which power human progress.”
2. Being empathetic – serving the trust and transparency to customers, partners and teams. 3. Being devoted – sharing success and being the champion of the organisation.
As a manager, Joseph heavily focuses on three key elements that form part of the Kyndryl Way:
Building a new company during a pandemic was not without its challenges, but Joseph remembers it as a very exciting time. He reflects, “In the UK and Ireland, we had multiple lockdowns, so we would have a month where we could be in
1. Being restless – continuously anticipating, learning and innovating. 12
“The Kyndryl Way will evolve overtime, but this renewed purpose has made it clear that each and every one of us plays a part in advancing the vital systems which power human progress” something exciting to look forward to as we exited the pandemic.”
the office, then a month or two of lockdown, then a period when only a certain number of people were allowed in, so it was with great relief when we announced our offices returning to normal operation. It was a huge step forwards in bringing the teams back fully energised. Today, the teams are in, and morale is soaring! It has been great to see. I think that building the company during Covid-19 gave us that extra motivation to create
So, what is Joseph’s approach to building a new ecosystem of trusted partners? He answers, “When I first took this role, I must have spoken to around 200 to 300 organisations in a period of three months. If someone reached out to ask for a conversation, the answer was always ‘yes absolutely’ because we were still in our discovery phase. It was all about understanding what was out there and how we can mobilise the power of partnerships for our customers. “As we started to understand the landscape of the best-in-class local partners, we always reflected on two key points; the first being if the organisation could support 13
us and our customers through technology or service excellence. Secondly, we wanted to know if the organisation would commit to a true partnership with us. Two organisations can easily work together, but being a partner is completely different to this; building a relationship with dedicated commitments to one another was key for us. Those two criteria formed the foundations of how we built our team.”
anywhere in the world. It is because of this that we have had huge traction and success with this partnership.” In building the ecosystem, Joseph has made a number of unexpected observations. He explains, “I have seen a few things that I did not expect. First of all is the blurring between competition and collaboration – the ability, as an example, for a NetApp, a Microsoft
“Kyndryl’s partners are paramount to bringing the innovation that customers increasingly demand. Joseph elaborates, “One of the best examples is NetApp” Kyndryl’s partners are paramount to bringing the innovation that customers increasingly demand. Joseph elaborates, “One of the best examples is NetApp. We had a relationship with them in the past, but as we became independent, NetApp came to us with a view to change the dynamic of the relationship and expand in the way we come together with our partners. They brought to us innovative technologies that we had not previously seen in their portfolio, and a unique ability to meet us hand-in-hand with our customers on prem, in the cloud,
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and a Kyndryl to build solutions to address challenges across a customer’s entire estate. Going into this, I expected to be able to offer more innovation through our ecosystem, but customers have brought us their most complex, unsolvable challenges, and by working together with multiple partners, we are able to solve these. “The second observation touches on our culture at Kyndryl. For us, working with partners is like building a set of muscles that we have not exercised in the past.
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“What this translates to is a shift in mentality from a ‘vendor or supplier’ based relationship to a ‘partnership’ one. That was the initial learning curve for us, and it is fundamental to being able to partner in the right way. There will always be circumstances where one
“I am truly optimistic that our Alliances organisation will lead to transformational growth internally, transformation innovation for our customers, and transformational partnerships that we can really leverage to provide true technology choice for our customers” partner may be competitive with another, but at its core, you have a commitment to one another and try to do the best for each other. That is the minimum expectation we should have as an independent company when working with our partners.” The final point Joseph makes refers to Kyndryl’s global 17
partnership announcements. He says, “By becoming flatter, faster and more focused, we have been able to locally drive the partnerships that have the most relevance for our customers. While a global partnership is always great to see, we need to ground our approach to what our customers in the UK and Ireland find the most impactful. The 18
ability to supplement our global alliances with niche start-ups and best-in-class future technology firms is really exciting, and something we are placing a big emphasis on.” Kyndryl is at the genesis of its journey and all the lessons learnt in its first six months only
stand to improve the customer experience. Joseph concludes, “I am truly optimistic that our Alliances organisation will lead to transformational growth internally, transformation innovation for our customers, and transformational partnerships that we can really leverage to provide true technology choice for our customers. Today, we
support the mission critical systems – the hearts and lungs of our customers – and I have no doubt that the trust placed in us will only result in a long-term customer experience with unlimited potential. The sky really is the limit!” For further information, visit www.kyndryl.com 19
www.kyndryl.com
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