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On the day IBM announced she’d be stepping down, exiting CEO Ginni Rometty called Arvind Krishna “the right CEO for the next era” at the company. “He is a brilliant technologist who has played a significant role in developing our key technologies such as artificial intelligence, cloud, quantum computing and blockchain,” she said.

Indeed, Krishna has spent his entire professional career at IBM. The electrical engineering doctorate, who has more than a dozen co-author credits on technology patents, started at the company’s Watson Research labs in 1990. He stayed there for nearly two decades and later serv…