Item 1. Business
Item 1. Business .
Our Company
Kyndryl Holdings, Inc. (“we,” “Kyndryl” or the “Company”) is a leading technology services company and the largest IT infrastructure services provider in the world, serving thousands of enterprise customers and with operations in over 60 countries. We have a long track record of helping enterprises navigate major technological changes, particularly by enabling our customers to focus on the core aspects of their businesses during these shifts while trusting us with their most critical systems. Our purpose is to design, build and manage secure and responsive private, public and multi-cloud environments to serve our customers’ needs and accelerate their digital transformations.
We provide engineering talent, operating solutions and insights derived from our knowledge and data around IT systems. This enables us to deliver advisory, implementation and managed services at scale across technology infrastructures that allow our customers to de-risk and realize the full value of their digital transformations. We do this while embracing new technologies and solutions and continually expanding our skills and capabilities, as we help advance the vital systems that power progress for our customers. We deliver technology services capabilities, insights and depth of expertise to modernize and manage IT environments based on our customers’ unique needs. We offer services across domains such as cloud services, core enterprise and zCloud services, applications, data and artificial intelligence (“AI”) services, digital workplace services, security and resiliency services and network and edge services as we continue to support our customers through technological change. Our services enable us to modernize and manage cloud and on-premises environments as “one” for our customers, enabling them to scale seamlessly.
To deliver these services, we rely on our team of skilled practitioners, consisting of approximately 80,000 professionals. Since our large and diversified customer base operates in multiple industries and geographies, we utilize a flexible labor and delivery model with a balanced mix of global and local talent as needed to meet customer-specific needs, regulatory requirements and data protection and labor laws. Our employees leverage their deep engineering expertise and extensive experience operating complex and heterogeneous technology environments to drive service quality, intellectual property development and our long-term trusted customer relationships.
As described in “— Our Customers,” we have many customer relationships that are decades long, as we provide high-quality, mission-critical services that are core to operations with customers that represent the backbones of their respective industries. These customers entrust us to deliver the services they need and to manage their complex environments so that they can achieve their business objectives.
We partner with a broad ecosystem, including a wide range of hyperscale cloud providers, system integrators, independent software vendors and technology vendors from startups to market leaders. This enables us to serve our customers with contemporary technology capabilities that best fit their needs and open new avenues for growth. This is all underpinned by our ability to integrate and operate mission-critical technology at scale using deep engineering expertise and intellectual property.
Our approach has enabled us to reach significant scale, with $16.1 billion in revenue in fiscal year 2024, which ended March 31, 2024. We are focused on driving revenue growth with sustainable margins by extending our leadership in the markets in which we operate while investing in our capabilities and expanding our high-value, next-generation services consistent with customer needs.
Kyndryl’s Spin-off
In November 2021, our former parent company, International Business Machines Corporation (“IBM”, “Parent” or “former Parent”) effected the spin-off (the “Separation” or the “Spin-off”) of the infrastructure services unit (the “Kyndryl Businesses”) of its Global Technology Services segment through the distribution of shares of Kyndryl’s common stock to IBM stockholders (the “Distribution”). On November 3, 2021, the Separation was achieved through the former Parent’s pro rata distribution of 80.1% of the shares of common stock of Kyndryl to holders of the former Parent’s common stock as of the close of business on the record date of October 25, 2021. Kyndryl’s stock began trading
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as an independent company on November 4, 2021, and IBM disposed of its 19.9% retained interest in Kyndryl common stock in the year following the Spin-off.
Our Industry and Market Opportunity
We operate in an industry that provides services for the technology environments that power customers’ businesses. These services span areas such as management of mission-critical systems across dedicated data centers and multiple clouds. As customers advance their digital transformations, they are looking for partners that understand their business objectives and unique digital journeys and have the skills to engineer and operate the IT environments to enable their transformations. Our long-standing position as an informed and trusted partner, with decades-long relationships and leading capabilities, provides us with the knowledge and expertise to help existing and new customers realize their future.
The markets for these services are large and dynamic. We estimate that these markets, which are a subset of the total IT services market, collectively represent a $586 billion opportunity in calendar year 2024. Growth in this market is driven by services that are aligned to customers’ transformations, including public cloud managed services, data services, security services, intelligent automation services and managed services for edge environments.
Several trends underpin the growth of our market, including:
● Greater demand for digital transformation services. Companies continue to digitally transform to deliver better customer experiences and compete more effectively, which drives the need for services to support modernization of IT within the enterprise. This trend has expanded in recent years as organizations look to further their digital capabilities and new technologies proliferate. While customers seek to transform, skills availability often represents a challenge, with lack of skills often being an impediment to transformation of the IT environment.
● Ongoing migration to cloud. Companies continue to move workloads to the cloud, adopting new capabilities for flexibility, workload portability and management. Public cloud is an increasingly critical component of enterprise IT strategy, and hybrid and multi-cloud technologies offer flexibility to achieve security, performance and cost savings needed for critical workloads. These transitions are often complex, with companies frequently seeking assistance from service providers. The extension of cloud services to multiple environments in different locations has given rise to distributed cloud and migration of workloads to these infrastructures that have a greater fit for purpose.
● Rapid data growth. As economies have evolved digitally, significantly increasing data volume, management of this data has become much more complex. The challenge for many organizations is how to collect, harness and govern this data for insights, including by leveraging AI and generative AI, and realizing data readiness as a differentiator. Generating AI insights at scale requires establishing data foundations, architectures and large-language model operations frameworks. In order to leverage advanced capabilities such as AI, generative AI and machine learning, enterprises additionally need to address data privacy, compliance, security, multi-cloud data management and data governance across physical and virtual layers of the IT estate.
● Increasing need for secure systems. As technology environments become increasingly complex and online, remote and distributed work environments persist, cybersecurity will remain of paramount importance as threats proliferate. Breaches in security can have severe, lasting financial and reputational consequences on businesses. In response, businesses continue to build out their cybersecurity efforts, using service providers to augment their capabilities. Enterprises seek service providers that can deploy the expertise and resources needed to manage their growing cybersecurity needs with an efficient and comprehensive view of their IT environment.
● Accelerating pace of technological advancement. As companies adopt new technologies, such as AI and generative AI, for improved productivity, customer experience, operational agility, business performance and innovation, they often face challenges in complexity to integrate these new technologies with their existing IT estates. As a result, the required skills, integration burden and cost in end-to-end operational management often
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increases. As generative AI is disrupting businesses at an accelerated pace, adopting new technologies requires a well-designed IT environment orchestrated to effectively realize business objectives.
Our Services
We provide advisory, implementation and managed services in and across a range of technology domains to help our customers manage and modernize enterprise IT environments in support of their business and transformation objectives. Our services are differentiated based on our expertise, quality of service, innovation, and intellectual property and data around IT patterns across customers in the following domains:
● Cloud Services: We design, build and provide managed services for our customers’ multi-cloud environments. We apply a mix of skilled practitioners, intelligent automation and modern service management principles of Site Reliability Engineering, AI for IT operations (“AIOps”), Infrastructure as Code and DevOps. We help enterprises optimize their use of hyperscale cloud providers in a unified environment, seamlessly integrating services delivered by independent software vendors (“ISVs”), large public cloud providers, internal platforms and other technologies.
● Core Enterprise & zCloud Services: We establish and operate modern technology infrastructure on behalf of enterprise customers to enable their current and future growth and profitability objectives, whether they want to modernize their existing infrastructure, integrate their existing infrastructure with hyperscale cloud providers, or migrate to a new platform. We support a range of enterprise architectures, including mainframe environments, distributed computing, enterprise networks and storage environments.
● Application, Data & AI Services: We provide end-to-end enterprise data services, including data transformation, data architecture and management, data governance and compliance and data migration. We support chief digital officers, chief information officers (“CIOs”) and chief technology officers (“CTOs”) in governing the vast quantities of enterprise data across internal and external sources to drive their digital strategies, transactions and business objectives and to enable the implementation of AI and generative AI tools, while maintaining security, ethical standards and compliance with country-specific data protection regulations. We provide services to design, build, manage and automate the IT environments for enterprise applications as they migrate to the cloud. Our services help CIOs and CTOs unlock the full value of leading third-party enterprise resource planning systems (e.g., Oracle and SAP) and packaged applications through the use of AI and software-defined technologies.
● Digital Workplace Services: Our digital workplace services provide the technology infrastructure, mobility, security and access solutions to support a global workforce that is constantly evolving. Our services include enterprise mobility solutions that provide users with the ability to work seamlessly across environments and locations.
● Security & Resiliency Services: We provide comprehensive enterprise cybersecurity services for chief information security officers (“CISOs”) and chief risk officers, including insights, protection, detection, response and recovery to support the security of our customers’ hybrid IT estates, data and operations. Concurrently, we provide resiliency services that include a mix of business continuity planning and cloud-based disaster recovery capabilities (composed of experts, digital tools, automation and failover environments). These services allow our customers to operate without issue or disruption in response to attacks, outages, natural disasters and geopolitical events.
● Network Services & Edge: We provide network and edge services to help customers meet their technological and commercial requirements for connectivity and compute across their digital environments. Our strategy and assessment services help evaluate customers’ network needs for their multi-cloud environments, while our network transformation and managed services allow customers to realize benefits of the latest software-defined network technologies and wireless technologies. We deliver these services with a proprietary framework and architecture coupled with proof of concepts to then implement and manage enterprise networks with the appropriate economics.
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Our advisory and implementation services are branded as “Kyndryl Consult,” span all six of the practices described above, and represented approximately 15 percent of our total revenue for the year ended March 31, 2024. In the area of AI and generative AI, we both (i) apply AI and machine learning to deliver services through our Kyndryl Bridge operating platform and (ii) enable our customers to deploy AI and generative AI solutions through our data architecture, data governance, network and security services.
Our Competitive Strengths
We are the largest IT infrastructure services provider in the world. We are a recognized leader in many of the services we provide. We are known for our technology integration and modernization expertise – advising, designing, building and managing complex technology environments. Our global, high-quality service delivery is underpinned by experienced and highly-trained practitioners who deliver our capabilities to our customers on a daily basis. Importantly, our culture of customer service excellence – especially in times of crisis, from pandemics to natural disasters, cyber-attacks and power outages – carries on from our heritage through our people. Given our unique capabilities, scale, intellectual property and engineering talent, we are positioned to partner with enterprises for their future across a range of technologies, use cases and business strategies to help them maximize the return on their technology investments and digital transformations.
Our competitive strengths stem from our intellectual property and data around IT patterns, our employees’ experience and knowledge, our mission-critical expertise and our broad ecosystem of partners:
● We are a leader in technology services . We are the largest provider of IT infrastructure services and are recognized by research analysts as a leader in key service areas. Through our delivery capabilities, AI that augments our people and underpins our Kyndryl Bridge operating platform, and scale, we provide mission-critical services to a diversified customer base. We possess significant experience in virtually all industries, gained through collaboration with customers over 30 years designing, building and managing operating environments for their IT systems. Our highly skilled workforce provides the expertise (e.g., approximately 41,000 hyperscale cloud provider certifications) to securely and reliably handle many of the most complex issues. We also have unique intellectual property applicable to IT environments, as reflected by our portfolio of more than 3,300 patents.
● We consistently deliver performance and reliability for complex environments . Our expert practitioners and talented engineers provide services through modern ways of working, such as Agile and DevSecOps. Together with our customers and partners, we co-create solutions to complex real-world business problems, leveraging Kyndryl Vital, our design-led co-creation experience. Additionally, our unique intellectual property and industry-leading technology platforms utilize contemporary approaches to IT operations to provide reliable and efficient solutions for each customer’s operating model. These capabilities allow us to execute with secure and compliant operating and delivery models at scale, driving high-quality performance and customer satisfaction. We realize high-quality performance across thousands of service-level agreements and consistently achieve top-tier customer satisfaction and advocacy.
● We deliver insights at scale, supported by unique automation capabilities, end-to-end orchestration of processes and application of AI . Our ability to deliver superior outcomes for customers is driven by our capacity to leverage our data around IT patterns and insights, derived from multiple technology environments across customer engagements. We apply machine learning, combined with our practitioner expertise, to derive unique insights used to service customers, enhance our offerings and produce our next-generation services. For example, we are recognized leaders in the use of automation and operational AI in the delivery of our services, executing more than 100 million automated actions per month in the IT environments we manage, which enables greater quality and efficiency for us and our customers. We leverage our operational AI approach and set of technologies, along with intellectual property that we apply and continually evolve to develop predictive actions to prevent issues before they arise.
● We are a recognized leader in managed services for cloud and on-premises environments and services such as security and resiliency. We offer a range of high-value capabilities including cloud services and security and resiliency services, providing us with a sustainable competitive advantage when helping customers transform
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their technology environments. Our multi-cloud management capabilities are differentiated by our ability to deliver an integrated view of our customers’ diverse technology environments and to provide our services and solutions digitally. We offer integrated services between the cloud and on-premises environments and manage the world’s largest mainframe estate.
● We offer an integrated ecosystem to help customers adopt and run increasingly heterogeneous sets of technologies . As customers pursue multiple cloud-based technology partners, applications and capabilities, integration is increasingly critical for customers to manage and orchestrate the technology environments required to run their businesses and achieve their broader objectives. We provide holistic services across thousands of diverse technologies, delivering end-to-end integration across public and private / on-premises cloud platforms and other full-stack technology solutions. Our robust ecosystem of strategic global alliances and technology partners, including large public cloud providers, independent software vendors and other players in the technology stack, allows us to provide industry-leading technologies and capabilities for our customers.
Our Strategies
Our strategy is centered on our ability to build and enrich trusted relationships with customers and technology partners, differentiating Kyndryl through our proven ability to create and deploy scale-derived intellectual property, provide mission-critical expertise across industries and partner with a broad ecosystem for contemporary capabilities that best suit customers’ needs. We have a strong and long-standing foundation developed by governing and managing complex technology environments, including a range of third-party technologies (e.g., SAP, VMware, Red Hat, Dell and ServiceNow). We regularly introduce new capabilities with a highly curated ecosystem of technology providers, including strategic relationships with Microsoft, Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services announced since our Spin-off. Through these alliances, we are developing more services to expand the role we play with existing customers and to access new customers and markets.
We have a long track record of running customers’ technology environments, enabling them to focus on the core aspects of their businesses. Given the nature of the work we do, we have a unique perspective on the operating paradigms that enable the high-quality technology environments which our customers have come to rely on for their most critical systems. This position enables us to meet customers where they are in their unique digital transformations, work alongside our customers to take them where they want to be and in turn enable them to realize the full, at-scale value of that journey. Underpinning all of this are our intellectual property, mission-critical expertise across industries and a broad ecosystem of technology alliances.
Our focus is centered on the following strategic tenets:
● Scale insights and intellectual property . We are investing to position ourselves at the forefront of developing and innovating the services and operating paradigms for the evolution and integration of mission-critical technology, further expanding our existing intellectual property in differentiated areas. Our depth of experience implementing and operating complex architectures across technology sets has yielded valuable experience and intellectual property. We have more than 3,300 patents that relate to various areas of running complex technology environments, including patents related to multi-cloud management, orchestration, integrated monitoring, issue triage and resolution and other areas that enable quality of service. Our mission-critical expertise across all industries, augmented by our automation platforms that draw on our IP and data, is a key differentiator in managing complex technology environments.
● Diverse ecosystem . As an independent entity, we have embraced a broad ecosystem of strategic partnerships with a wider set of technology and services companies. We are investing in an ecosystem of technology providers and corresponding skill-sets that are increasingly relevant as enterprises digitize and transform their business models, building on our existing base of certifications across many market-leading technologies. In parallel, we are extending our operating, governance and compliance models to this broader set of technologies to integrate and provide end-to-end capabilities for our customers as they digitize and evolve their environments.
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● Digitally consumable services models . Looking ahead, we see opportunity to further expand in areas where we can serve customers through consumption models that allow them to experience our services digitally. These models will combine our Kyndryl Bridge platform – an open integration platform that delivers IT solutions by leveraging Kyndryl’s core strengths, data-driven insights and expertise, to create an uninterrupted path between a digital business and the technology that delivers it – with our technology governance and capabilities from our ecosystem partners for ease-of-use and scalability, tailored to the needs of specific customer segments.
To execute these strategies, our operating model increasingly reflects that of a flat, fast and focused services company, centered around our customers’ success. We are pursuing an investment and co-investment strategy focused on building and maintaining world-class teams, developing aligned intellectual property and automation, and leveraging our ecosystem of technology alliance partners.
To accelerate our return to profitable growth, we are aggressively executing on our “three-A” initiatives – Alliances, Advanced Delivery and Accounts. We believe our implementation of these strategic priorities will enhance the services we provide to our customers and will make significant positive contributions to our financial performance, both in the near term and over the next several years. Our global teams are leveraging our partnerships with leading technology vendors, further strengthening the automation we deploy in delivering our services, and addressing elements of our business with substandard margins as follows:
● Alliances initiative – Driving signings, certifications and revenues with our new ecosystem partners and capabilities. We leverage our relationships with key hyperscale cloud providers and other leading technology vendors to expand our cloud and other offerings in the market, and the range of technology solutions we can offer to, and implement for, our customers. Since our Spin-off, we have announced business alliances with Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, SAP, Dell, Cisco, Cloudflare and ServiceNow among others. We continue to expand the cloud-related capabilities we offer to customers and are growing the number of our hyperscale cloud provider certifications.
● Advanced Delivery initiative – Transforming service delivery through upskilling and automation. Our expanded use of automation and other technology tools allows us to further strengthen the quality of services we deliver to our customers, drive efficiency in our operations, and redeploy professionals in our organization to serve new revenue streams and backfill attrition as they arise. Our increased use of automation and AI within our delivery operations helps to reduce costs across the entire organization.
● Accounts initiative – Addressing elements of our business with substandard margins. We are working to transform the profitability of certain revenue streams that represent a meaningful portion of our business. For instance, we frequently expand the scope of customer relationships by adding higher-value services and leveraging our new ecosystem partners’ capabilities. When necessary, we reduce scope by removing, or not renewing, unprofitable elements of a contract. We reduce costs by applying our Advanced Delivery tools and processes to replace labor-intensive and/or customized services with automated and/or more standardized solutions. When managed-services contracts are renegotiated and renewed, we adjust pricing and other terms to enhance our margins. Given the mission-critical nature of our services and our long-standing relationships, we are experiencing an openness among our customers to find solutions. On the rare occasion when no other resolution is available for a situation with an unsustainable margin profile, we will allow a contract to end without renewing it, and we will optimize the cost to serve until expiration.
In fiscal 2025, we intend to continue accelerating our transformation through our three-A’s initiatives, continue growing Kyndryl Consult and optimize our costs and expenses in all areas of our business, from service delivery to corporate functions. Kyndryl Consult, which represented approximately 15 percent of our revenue for the year ended March 31, 2024, represents a range of advisory and implementation services that we provide to customers, across all six of our practices and all of our geographic segments. We expect these initiatives to propel us toward profitable growth and enable us to deliver more value to customers and stockholders.
Our corporate citizenship strategy is at the heart of Kyndryl’s purpose to power human progress. We aim to create a sustainable and inclusive future by driving sustainable business practices, and positive social impact at scale. As
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an independent company, Kyndryl is embracing environmental stewardship, fostering social inclusivity and promoting good governance practices.
In September 2023, Kyndryl published its inaugural Corporate Citizenship Report outlining our commitments. This includes achieving net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2040 and a 50% reduction in global emissions including our value chain by 2030 aligned with the Science Based Targets initiative. The commitment reinforces Kyndryl’s dedication to operating responsibly as it built the foundation of the program globally.
Beyond our environmental commitments, Kyndryl is focused on building a diverse workforce and an inclusive and equitable culture. Our approach to our workplace consists of empowering employees to advance their careers through ongoing training and upskilling. Kyndryl has published its human rights and modern slavery statement and launched the Kyndryl Foundation, which delivers philanthropic grants for community development programs.
With respect to governance matters, Kyndryl also leverages industry best practices to govern its quality management system, processes and tools to enable operations to meet the standards of compliance and responsible business practices that clients and partners expect. We also maintain a Code of Conduct for directors, executive officers and employees which summarizes our policies addressing anti-harassment, anti-discrimination, retaliation prevention, physical security and cybersecurity, confidentiality and data privacy, and prevention of fraud, waste and abuse.
Our Customers
Our customer relationships across a broad range of industries demonstrate the deep level of trust that we have earned and the role we play as a partner that provides technical expertise, insight and intellectual property to solve customer challenges. We are the trusted advisor and partner to thousands of customers worldwide, in technology-intensive and often highly regulated environments, managing mission-critical technology environments across a wide range of industries.
● Nearly 50 percent of our revenue is derived from companies in the financial services industry, where we serve hundreds of global, multinational and regional banks, insurance companies, mutual fund complexes, credit card and transaction processors and providers of other financial services.
● Approximately 20 percent of our revenue is generated from technology, media and telecom companies.
● Nearly 15 percent of our revenue is from retail and travel companies.
● More than 10 percent of our revenue is generated from the industrial sector, which includes some of the largest automotive manufacturers in the world.
Our revenues are concentrated in the industries mentioned above, but our revenues are diversified across a broad set of customers. In fiscal year 2024, our top five customers accounted for approximately 10% of our revenue.
As companies engage in their digital journeys, they often face a key impediment because of the skills and expertise needed to realize their transformations. This, in part, is brought on by the increasing complexity of enterprise environments, the incorporation of new technologies and the deployment of different operating models. While many companies have strengthened their technology teams, they have also encountered difficulties in sourcing the breadth of expertise needed for their environments and leveraged service providers to address their needs. Companies will benefit from selecting service providers that have greater insight into their environments and needs, which advantages partners like Kyndryl who have industry-leading scale and long-standing customer relationships.
Through decades of collaboration with customers, we have developed deep relationships as we supported the technology environments that advanced their business agendas. Examples include:
Implementation of hybrid cloud and automation tools : Kyndryl executed a five-year contract with a U.S. healthcare services company to provide mission-critical IT managed services and accelerate its digital transformation with the aim of enhancing the patient and caregiver experience. Under this agreement, our customer will use Kyndryl
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Bridge to integrate AIOps and automation capabilities. As part of this collaboration, Kyndryl will deliver and support evolving IT capabilities via a built-for-purpose dedicated command center. Enabled by Kyndryl-managed services experts, the command center will focus on providing the highest levels of quality and reliability to support our customer in delivering the highest levels of safe patient care. Our customer will also tap into Kyndryl’s broad set of technologies and skills, including Kyndryl Consult and its global strategic partnership with Microsoft, to migrate critical workloads, resulting in a more modern and resilient hybrid cloud infrastructure.
Complex mainframe transformation, moving applications to the cloud : We extended our partnership with a leading telecommunications provider in the UK to collaborate on a cutting-edge program to move a number of its critical mainframe applications to the cloud. The ten-year partnership, which draws on our hyperscale cloud provider capabilities and partner ecosystem, will allow the customer to reduce mainframe operating costs and energy consumption. In moving to the cloud, our customer’s mainframe applications will become more digital with application programming interfaces and micro-services capabilities, to help integrate the value of data across its systems and drive innovation through automation. Migrating from mainframes to cloud extends the usefulness and lifespan of these applications in a modern, micro-services led, cloud-centric way and helps to unlock intelligent data insights within these key applications.
Large-scale transformation to cloud : We partnered with a large, European financial institution to help it migrate from a predominantly on-premises, classic infrastructure environment to a cloud-based infrastructure, utilizing both private and public clouds. We provided the expertise and support to navigate this digital transformation while maintaining and improving quality of service as we moved over 1,000 applications. We also deployed a new Kubernetes container-based environment and management capabilities to increase workload portability and flexibility. This work enabled the customer’s platform to run with increased digital agility and efficiency, embedding strong data security within the new cloud-based infrastructure and providing alignment to the existing infrastructure environment. The customer’s transformation has produced clear business benefits, from new products and services that are brought to market faster, to an increase in sales through online channels.
Modernization of the technology environment : Based on a relationship spanning almost two decades, we partnered with a large European bank to help launch a ten-year transformational program to increase operational agility and efficiency by optimizing the customer’s critical infrastructure, reducing complexity, migrating to hybrid cloud and reducing operational costs. We reduced IT infrastructure complexity by redesigning critical infrastructure architecture, including networks, storage, virtualization and data backup for improved efficiency, enabled ‘scalable’ hybrid cloud by implementing and updating existing systems to a hybrid cloud solution supported by Red Hat and transformed legacy IT services by modernizing tools and the operating model for deployment of IT services. The customer will benefit from modern IT infrastructure including cloud and mainframes that supports their core banking services and treasury functions.
Digital transformation across the enterprise : We collaborated with a large material sciences company in North America to support their mission-critical IT infrastructure globally, providing integrated management for environments that include hybrid cloud infrastructure, network, security and end-user services. Building on our history of collaboration with this customer, we are working to accelerate their digital transformation. We are helping our customer build foundational capabilities for their digital journey, powered by data, analytics and AI and machine learning integrated into core business processes and connected through a flexible and secure network.
Digitization for flexibility : Our customer, a large Japanese transportation company, was engaged in a technology-driven transformation to establish a flexible IT environment using hybrid cloud that evolves with changing business needs. We worked with the customer to build an integrated private and public cloud with the same virtualization architecture and a management capability that unifies operations and evolves with the business. Through our collaboration, we created an integrated infrastructure to meet our customer’s current and future needs by modernizing its on-premises, off-premises and network environments as well as its management platform. We deployed software-defined networks across the environment and automation to realize improved quality and business continuity. Our work helps support our customer’s efforts to become one of the most valued and preferred transportation companies in the world.
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Sales and Marketing
Our customer engagement and brand positioning are focused on deepening our existing customer relationships, attracting and winning new customers and creating an ecosystem built on go-to-market relationships with leading cloud and other technology providers, advisors and integrators to offer best-in-class advisory, implementation and managed services tailored to each existing and new customer’s environment and requirements.
Customer-centric account approach . We have dedicated account coverage teams within our global operating structure. The teams leverage our intellectual capital and tools underpinned by insights and proven practices derived from operating at scale. Senior account leaders orchestrate the teams and have end-to-end accountability from sale to delivery for customers. They tailor the full suite of our services to customers’ needs to deliver value and business outcomes across a wide range of technology environments. Account leaders are supported by dedicated, multi-disciplinary technical sales and delivery teams, consulting teams, as well as by shared services teams, to support an effective and efficient engagement. This account coverage model ensures consistent and reliable delivery of services for our existing relationships over the lifetime of current and renewal contracts. In addition, the model supports the potential expansion of existing relationships based on our deep industry perspective and expertise and knowledge of customers’ unique needs. Finally, this account-based model seeks to build and expand existing relationships with line-of-business buyers, as they have become critical decision makers working alongside our customers.
Customer growth and new customer acquisition. In line with our customer-centric approach, we are focused on co-creating and innovating with customers to advance and deepen our relationships. We leverage our broad base of expertise, capabilities and partners to prototype, test and develop innovative solutions across various approaches and technologies. Additionally, we offer Kyndryl Consult capabilities in advisory, implementation and transformation services to help customers enhance and evolve their technology environments. We deploy our talent, thought leadership, proven practices, intellectual capital and partnership ecosystem as part of our project engagements to mature them into longer-tail managed services opportunities. In addition, we attract and develop new customers across the globe via account-based marketing, insights derived from operating at scale and direct sales teams with years of sector-specific experience and proven practices to generate unique insights for customers. As we gain new customers, we apply our account coverage model to expand our relationships and footprint over time.
Partnership and alliance ecosystem. We are continuing to enhance and develop strategic partnerships with companies in the ecosystems most relevant to our customers’ digital transformations. This includes building new routes to market across these ecosystems to serve as a multiplier, enabling us to expand business via partners such as public cloud providers, ISVs, technology providers (ranging from established, scaled players to growth-stage start-ups), system integrators, business consulting firms and business services providers. These relationships bring value to our customers through broader access to best-in-class solutions that are tailored for their unique technology environments and digital journeys. We have several key partnerships, including with Microsoft, Google, Amazon Web Services, SAP, VMware, Cisco, Dell Technologies, Oracle, Cloudflare and ServiceNow that accelerate broader market participation, joint solution development and investment in skills and certification enhancements for Kyndryl. We have established dedicated teams to support our key alliance partners and will continue to co-create and co-market with them to deliver value to our mutual customers, driving differentiation in the market with industry-leading technology and Kyndryl services.
Our Competition
We compete in a market for technology services along with many other providers, ranging from small, highly specialized companies that serve a limited number of customers to large, multi-service enterprises with many clients. These service providers include incumbents that have expanded their offerings to migration and management of cloud-based environments; companies that utilize labor-based models and leverage talent pools primarily in lower-cost countries that have grown to offer a broad range of services with a worldwide presence; and advisory-focused system integrators specializing in bringing together disparate technology environments so that they function as one. Many of these companies offer a mix of advisory, implementation and managed services across infrastructure, application and business processes. Examples include Atos, DXC, Fujitsu, HCL, Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services and Wipro, among others.
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The basis of competition involves multiple factors, with key elements including quality of service, technical skills and capabilities, industry knowledge and experience, financial value, ability to innovate, intellectual property and methods, contracting flexibility and speed of execution. Long-standing partnerships and knowledge of the customers’ technology environment often enable service providers to better address requirements and future needs. Our decades-long collaboration with customers provides us with the insights to realize distinctive performance that supports their digital transformation. We deliver unique value by providing intellectual property derived from insights at scale, deploying mission-critical expertise and leveraging a broad ecosystem – while building and strengthening partnerships to enhance the customer experience.
We position ourselves uniquely, leveraging a core strength in governance and management of complex IT infrastructure environments, delivered through a global footprint. Our services support customers’ digital transformations, as we help accelerate their journeys by providing instrumented and engineered technology environments. We offer choice with consistency through an operating paradigm and management model built from our experiences with complex technologies. These capabilities uniquely position us as both a leading partner and competitor within the same market.
Intellectual Property
We are focused on developing leading-edge ideas and technologies and see innovation as a source of competitive advantage. We have more than 3,300 patents that are related to our business model. A key pillar of our strategy is continuing to invest in knowledge and intellectual property to support extending our services to a broader ecosystem of technology providers and customer challenges and solutions. Our decades of experiences working with our customers has generated operational insights, creating intellectual property that we leverage for the benefit of our customers and deploy at scale. We rely on intellectual property protections in the countries in which we operate, along with contractual restrictions, to establish and protect our offerings and services and other applicable rights. In addition, we license third-party software along with other technologies that are used in the provision of or incorporated into some elements of our services. We possess a significant intellectual property portfolio, which we believe is important to our success. However, we believe our business as a whole is not materially dependent on any particular intellectual property right or any particular group of patents, trademarks, copyrights or licenses.
Additionally, we own or have rights to various trademarks, logos, service marks and trade names that are used in the operation of our business. We also own or have the rights to copyrights that protect the content of our products and other proprietary materials.
Human Capital Resources
Employees
As of March 31, 2024, we had approximately 80,000 employees in more than 60 countries. Approximately 90% of our employees work outside the U.S., with workforce hubs in India, Poland, Brazil, Japan, Czechia and Hungary.
Our people advance the vital systems that power human progress. Our global workforce is highly skilled, reflective of the work we do for our customers’ digital transformations and in support of their mission-critical operations. Kyndryl professionals bring deep industry and technical expertise along with a passion for continuous learning. Our employees, whom we call Kyndryls, have earned certifications through our learning platform and alliance partners, which provide access to curriculums that span strategic skills, cloud, AI, analytics, design thinking, quantum computing and security. At Kyndryl, we aim to be:
● Restless to power the future; eager to learn and innovate
● Empathetic role models; serving with trust and transparency
● Focused on shared success to achieve both business results and key human capital goals – driving a deep analytic understanding of people, technology and customer challenges
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● Fast, agile change leaders with courage to be bold and judgment to manage risk
● Dedicated to building empowered, inclusive and accountable teams; recruiting, retaining and developing diverse talent that enhances performance and capabilities
We support new ways of working and accelerated career progression promoting innovation throughout our organization. Our Kyndryl Way is founded on our Vision to become an “employer of choice” and is founded on our aim to advance what’s next for ourselves and our customers.
Our people are at the center of designing, building and managing the technology environments that the world depends on every day. We will continue to invest in our teams to be at the heart of technological change for our customers. We offer comprehensive market-competitive rewards and benefits programs including health benefits, mental health support and employee assistance plans, retirement savings benefits, paid time off and recognition programs, among others.
Talent and Culture; Inclusion, Diversity and Equity
Our business is centered around our people, and our talent strategy revolves around our ability to best serve our customers through ongoing investment in talent and skill development. We attract, develop and retain talent in a competitive and dynamic environment. We are focused on optimizing the employee experience at Kyndryl through:
● Attracting: Elevating the Kyndryl brand and creating a candidate experience where diversity, equity and inclusion are at the forefront of the hiring process. We proactively source talent both internally and externally with advanced capabilities to ensure that we have the right talent, at the right time, in the right place
● Developing: Providing employees with transparency to understand the skills, capabilities and experiences essential to our growth and their progression over their career by ensuring access to resources specifically designed to advance critical skills and competencies
● Retaining: Communicating our strategy and building our Kyndryl culture; establishing programs that are focused on rewarding value creation; recognizing performance; and driving accountability balanced with workplace flexibility, well-being, continuous learning and a diverse, inclusive and equitable environment
We are committed to building the technical careers of the future and have made investments in training and skills to enable our people to be relevant, experienced and technically positioned to serve our customers on their most complex challenges. We continue to expand our certifications and accreditations each year through consistent investment in skill development around emerging technologies and key areas for growth.
Health, Safety and Well-Being
Protecting the health, safety and well-being of our employees is a top priority. We have an experienced Health and Safety team comprised of medical doctors, nurses, industrial hygiene, safety and workforce health experts. This team has implemented a health and safety management system that monitors our locations for compliance with all local health and safety regulations, minimizes workplace health and safety risks, and provides for safe and healthy workplaces so our employees can do their best work.
Available Information
We are required to file annual, quarterly and current reports, proxy statements and other information with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”). The SEC maintains a website that contains reports, proxy and information statements and other information regarding issuers that file electronically with the SEC at http://www.sec.gov. The Company’s Annual Reports on Form 10-K, Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q and Current Reports on Form 8-K, proxy statements and amendments to those documents filed or furnished pursuant to Section 13(a) or 15(d) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended (“Exchange Act”), are also available free of charge on the Company’s internet website at www.kyndryl.com as soon as reasonably practicable after those documents are electronically filed with or furnished to the SEC.
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We routinely post on or make accessible through our corporate website at www.kyndryl.com and Investor Relations website at https;//investors.kyndryl.com information that may be material or of interest to our investors, including news and materials regarding our financial performance, business developments, investor events and other important information regarding the Company. You may automatically receive email alerts and other information about the Company when you enroll your email address by visiting the “Investor Email Alerts” section under the “Resources” section at https://investors.kyndryl.com. We encourage investors, media, our customers, consumers, business partners and others interested in our Company to review the information we provide through these channels. The information contained on the websites referenced above is not, and shall not be deemed to be, incorporated into this filing or any of our other filings with the SEC.
Executive Officers of the Registrant:
Our executive officers as of the date hereof are as follows:
Martin Schroeter. Mr. Schroeter, 59, was appointed our Chief Executive Officer in January 2021 and was appointed as Chairman of the Board in October 2021 in connection with the Spin-off. Previously, Mr. Schroeter served in a variety of business line and finance executive positions at IBM, including Senior Vice President of Global Markets from 2018 until 2020, responsible for IBM’s global sales, customer relationships and satisfaction and worldwide geographic operations and overseeing IBM’s marketing and communication functions and building IBM’s brand and reputation globally, and Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer from 2014 until 2017, leading IBM’s finance function. Earlier in his career, Mr. Schroeter served as General Manager of IBM global financing, managing a total asset base in excess of $37 billion, and had served numerous roles in Japan, the United States and Australia. Mr. Schroeter received his MBA from Carnegie Mellon University and his undergraduate degree from Temple University.
David Wyshner. Mr. Wyshner, 57, was appointed our Chief Financial Officer in September 2021. From March 2020 until his appointment as our Chief Financial Officer, Mr. Wyshner served as the Chief Financial Officer at XPO Logistics, Inc., where he led all financial functions for the global transportation and contract logistics company. Prior to that, Mr. Wyshner served as the Chief Financial Officer at Wyndham Hotels & Resorts, Inc. from May 2018 to December 2019, and as its senior advisor from December 2019 to March 2020. He served as Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of Wyndham Worldwide Corporation, from which Wyndham Hotels was spun-off, from August 2017 to May 2018. From August 2006 to June 2017, Mr. Wyshner served as the Chief Financial Officer of Avis Budget Group and also served as Avis Budget Group’s president from January 2016 to June 2017. Mr. Wyshner received his MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and his BA in applied mathematics from Yale University.
Elly Keinan. Mr. Keinan, 59, was appointed our Group President in March 2021. Since September 2020, Mr. Keinan has served as a venture partner at Pitango Venture Capital, focusing on scaling the success of growth stage technology companies, and as an advisor to Sumitomo Corporation. Prior to that, Mr. Keinan served a variety of executive roles at IBM from July 1987 to June 2020, including General Manager of IBM North America and Chairman of IBM Japan, and held top leadership roles in Latin America and Europe. Mr. Keinan currently serves on the boards of Cellebrite, Ottopia and United Way of New York City. Mr. Keinan received his MBA from University of Miami Herbert Business School and his Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
Maryjo Charbonnier. Ms. Charbonnier, 54, was appointed our Chief Human Resources Officer in July 2021. From January 2015 until her appointment, Ms. Charbonnier served as the Chief Human Resources Officer at Wolters Kluwer, where she was responsible for the design and implementation of all human resources strategies, policies and processes. Prior to that, Ms. Charbonnier served as the Chief Human Resources Officer at Broadridge Financial Solutions from August 2008 to December 2014. From August 1995 to August 2008, Ms. Charbonnier was an HR executive in a variety of leadership roles at PepsiCo, including Vice President for Talent Sustainability for PepsiCo Foods Americas. Ms. Charbonnier received her MBA from Southern Methodist University and her undergraduate degree from Catholic University.
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Edward Sebold. Mr. Sebold, 59, was appointed our General Counsel and Secretary in October 2021 in connection with the Spin-off. From March 2012 until his appointment as our General Counsel, Mr. Sebold served as Assistant General Counsel at IBM, leading several global legal functions at IBM, including teams that worked with services, IBM's Watson Health, litigation and mergers and acquisitions. Prior to joining IBM in 2012, Mr. Sebold was a partner at Jones Day in the firm’s Cleveland and Houston offices. Mr. Sebold serves on the board of the Pro Bono Partnership. Mr. Sebold received his JD from University of Michigan and his Bachelor of Arts in economics from John Carroll University.
Vineet Khurana. Mr. Khurana, 51, was appointed our Controller in May 2021 and to the additional office of Vice President in November 2021. Since July 2020, Mr. Khurana had been serving as Chief Financial Officer of IBM’s Global Business Services unit. Prior to assuming this role, Mr. Khurana was the Chief Financial Officer of IBM Europe from March 2018 through July 2020 and the Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of IBM United Kingdom and Ireland from July 2016 until March 2018. Earlier in his IBM tenure, Mr. Khurana held roles of increasing responsibility spanning IBM’s financial strategy and IBM’s Global Financing division. Mr. Khurana also serves as an External Governor and a member of the Infrastructure and Finance Committee of the University of Portsmouth, United Kingdom. Mr. Khurana received his MBA from University of Warwick, United Kingdom and his undergraduate degree in Chemical Engineering from Manipal Institute of Technology, India.