No Kyndryl Involved in IBM i Tech Support, Jarman Says
February 2, 2022 Alex Woodie
The org chart has been on an extended spin cycle lately at IBM, with the spin out of the Global Technology Services (GTS) business into Kyndryl as well as the merging of IBM Lab Services and the Services and Support Group. But unless you’re signed up for its IBM i cloud service or had some other arrangement with GTS, you likely won’t be calling on Kyndryl for technical support.
The question of Kyndryl’s current role with the IBM i customer base came up during the recent webinar HelpSystems held to discuss its 2022 IBM i Marketplace Report. Ian Jarman, the CTO for IBM Lab Services, took the opportunity to clarify any confusion regarding Kyndryl and the IBM i installed base.
“Let me be really clear about that: The service and support did not move to Kyndryl,” Jarman said. “When Kyndryl spun out of IBM, services and support came into IBM Systems Group. And that’s the group that Lab Services was just integrated with in the past week.”
It seems possible that the timing of the Kyndryl spinout and the merger of the services and support business with Lab Services was enough to make some IBM i professionals wonder if they’ll be calling on Kyndryl for standard technical support issues as part of a break-fix support contract. That will not be happening, Jarman said.
“We’re here. We’re not going anywhere,” the former IBM i product manager from Rochester, Minnesota, said. “We’re part of IBM Systems. We’re here to provide you break-fix support, software and hardware maintenance, as well as integrating with the Lab Services team. So no changes there, except that we’re more integrated into IBM Systems and trust me, given that I’m part of that group, we’re very focused on IBM i.”
In November, IBM completed the spinout of its the IBM GTS business into Kyndryl, an independent company that trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol KD. Based in New York City, Kyndryl has six practices, including cloud; the digital workplace; security and resiliency; network and edge; core enterprise and zCloud; and applications, data and artificial intelligence (AI).
While the company is technically just a few months old, Kyndryl already boasts annual revenue of about $19 billion thanks to a diverse array of business. In an October virtual event, CEO Martin Schroeter stated:
“We have unmatched intellectual capital and IP, more than 3,000 patents issued, 800 patents pending and 200 more are already submitted. We have world class expertise, with 90,000 employees who have an average of 10 years of industry experience. And we have global scale with state-of-the-art delivery operations around the world, a presence in 63 countries and 459 data centers under our management.”
Incidentally, Kyndryl’s public cloud service does support IBM i as well as enterprise platforms running on IBM iron, like z/OS. The company says that it’s “managed extended cloud IaaS for IBM i provides a multi-tenant, scalable, security-rich and managed IBM i environment, that can be delivered through an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud consumption model.”
But when it comes to regular IBM i tech support, your calls will still be routed to IBM.
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