IBM Corp.’s management team appears to have quietly undergone some major changes this month.

According to the Next Platform, the reorganization was initiated late last week after the retirement of Robert LeBlanc, a 36-year veteran of the company who most recently headed its cloud division. There was no advance warning of his departure, but SiliconANGLE Media co-founder and longtime analyst Dave Vellante doesn’t view the changing of the guard as particularly unexpected.

“It’s no surprise that LeBlanc retires after 36 years,” Vellante said. “People were surprised when a IBM veteran was put in charge of cloud in the first place, but it was expected to be short-lived.”

LeBlanc’s retirement was quickly followed by the merger of IBM’s cloud operation with its cross-division analytics business, which had in turn been headed by fellow company veteran Bob Picciano. Unlike his former colleague, however, the executive isn’t retiring but instead taking over the Power Systems family. The hardware line is being rebranded to Cognitive Systems in the process to reflect the fact that it’s been updated to focus on data processing.

“The logic is that they’re renaming Power into Cognitive Systems as they go all-in on cognitive,” Vellante explained. “They’re saying that the applications that are running on top of that platform are cognitive and we need someone who understands them.” The time Picciano spent heading its analytics business gives him a unique insight into those workloads, particularly IBM’s Watson artificial intelligence.

As for the divisions that Picciano and LeBlanc are leaving behind, they’ll move under the responsibility of long-term IBM Research director Arvind Krishna. It’s a big promotion even for an executive who has until now managed some 3,000 scientists across six continents. “The move to put analytics and cloud together gives Arvind Krishna a huge piece of IBM’s business, at least a $30 billion business,” Vellante said.

Krishna will report to John Kelly, who is now the now senior vice president of Cognitive Solutions and IBM Research. Over on the hardware side, meanwhile, Picciano will work under IBM Systems Senior Vice President Tom Rosamilia.

Image courtesy of IBM

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