Kyndryl’s CFO on the strategy that propelled the IBM spinoff onto the Fortune 500, boosted revenue, and saved millions

Good morning.

A year ago when I first spoke with David Wyshner, CFO of tech company Kyndryl, he was spending a great deal of his time working to attract new investors. Existing as a legacy spinoff from IBM, and going public without the benefit of an IPO meant having to come up with an effective way to start telling the company’s story in order to survive. Fast forward to today, Kyndryl is now one of the largest corporations in the U.S. by revenue, propelled by a three-part strategy that’s also led to millions in cost savings.

Kyndryl Holdings landed at No. 225 on the 2023 Fortune 500 list, generating revenue of $18.3 billion in 2022. The revenue threshold for making the Fortune 500 list was $7.2 billion this year, up 13% from a year ago.

Kyndryl is IBM’s previously managed IT infrastructure services business. It was officially spun off from the tech giant in November 2021, making 2022 its first full year as an independent company trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker KD. Kyndryl’s chairman and CEO is Martin Schroeter, a former CFO at IBM. The company claims to be the world’s largest IT infrastructure services provider. Deutsche Bank is just one of the large financial institutions on its roster of clients.

Three-A strategy

Kyndryl faced an uphill battle, saddled with 40% of its contracts that were making little or no profit at the time of the spinoff. A year ago, Kyndryl executives, led by Schroeter, initiated a plan to position the company for long-term sustainable, profitable growth, Wyshner says.

“We laid out a series of strategies called the ‘Three A’s’: going after alliances, advanced deliveries, and accounts,” he says. “We put numbers associated with them in terms of what they can contribute over time. And we said we're going to report on these metrics each quarter and each year so that people could see our progress.”

Is he sharing the Three A’s strategy in his storytelling to investors? “So much so, that the joke with my investor relations team is that we're going to dress up as the Three A's for Halloween,” Wyshner quips. But the strategy, “I think really resonates with our shareholders because they see how the combination of them can really have a transformational impact on us as a company,” he says.

When it comes to alliances, “it's moving from having been an IBM captive to working with a broader range of leading technology providers,” Wyshner says. Kyndryl had $1.2 billion in signings with cloud hyper-scalers (or massive cloud providers), taking advantage of alliances with AWS, Microsoft, and Google Cloud. This exceeded the company’s billion-dollar target.

Kyndryl is striving to emerge from a legacy of past IBM contracts and eventually move toward a hybrid infrastructure and more efficiency. To take full advantage of customers’ need to modernize and move to the cloud, Wyshner has steadily invested in training. Team members, called “Kyndryls,” now have more than 35,000 certifications on the major cloud platforms, a 100% increase from a year ago, according to the company.

Regarding advanced delivery of information to customers, Kyndryl has redeployed more than 5,500 delivery professionals to serve new revenue streams and backfill attrition. This resulted in annualized savings of $275 million versus a $200 million target, Wyshner says.

“With advanced delivery, we can be even better in terms of the infrastructure services we provide our customers, and we can reduce our costs at the same time,” he says.

With the accounts initiative, Kyndryl is making progress in addressing elements of its business with substandard margins, and helping modernize its clients' IT systems, with applications like Kyndryl Consult. There was $210 million in annual savings from the accounts initiative versus a $200 million target, Wyshner says.

“It's really satisfying to see our organization rally around a set of initiatives,” he says. “We communicated them clearly internally, and had people delivering on them in ways very consistent with the faster, more focused culture that we're striving for.”

But getting an organization with about 90,000 employees worldwide on the same page during a transformation can have its challenges. “Cultural change takes time,” Wyshner says. “But we're committed to that.” Becoming an independent company, moving off of several hundred IBM systems, and developing new ways of doing things is no small feat. “It's been a lot of work, but I think it's really exciting to tackle,” he says.

As the company works its way through legacy contracts, Wyshner is looking forward to the progress of the Three A’s over time, and “the best ways to tell that story,” he says.

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Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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