Julio Heshiki

Kyndryl is currently the largest and lead service provider for IT infrastructure services in Mexico’s IT industry.

What strategies is Kyndryl using to assure growth in 2023?

Our main goal for 2023 is growth, and Kyndryl Mexico is set to focus on building its portfolio. We will take two things into consideration: offerings that will differentiate us from the rest of the market and investment in our people. Our offerings came from our previous company, IBM. Kyndryl started in 2021 spun-off from IBM IT infrastructures. The company was born with the spirit of a start-up, but with a significant legacy in terms of experience, client base, and the support of an important company. Our global customer base includes 50% of those companies in the Fortune 500 and 75% of the Fortune 100 companies. We focus on three areas: cloud, corrective prices systems, and workplace services. Those are the three core practices that we started with, though we later decided there were three other areas that were extremely critical and associated with such products and services: applications data and AI, security and resiliency, and network and H computing. The market is hot, and Mexico is becoming a hub for many companies. We design, build, transform, and manage IT environments over which mission-critical processes and platforms run the business for our clients.

What type of companies is Kyndryl focused on working with?

We focus on the financial industry, retail, industrial and transportation. We approach these potential customers through partnerships with other companies, an example being Oracle. We sign a global alliance with Oracle and there are certain elements of the infrastructure at our clients that will contain Oracle products. We integrate those, but there is no one single client that has only one single technology, and the complexity of integrations are managed. We might be working with a bank that has an on-prem data center that needs to be migrated to public and private environments with Microsoft, Azure, and AWS in Oracle components in it, and we remove the complexity for our clients. Their specialty might be finance. Pure infrastructure tends to be more of agnostic to some extent because it could be the same infrastructure that you might replicate regardless of the customer’s particular industry. You need the specialty of the industry as you get into the details and help the clients through the detail transformation process. You need to understand what finance is and why the digital channels and wider applications are so important. This differs from the industrial sphere where you need a resilient operation that can be sustained 24/7.

What do you consider to be the main accomplishments of Kyndryl in Mexico?

Number one is the fact that every single customer that we had in the past with our previous company came across to Kyndryl. They only established one condition: transfer the contract and make sure that the same people are working on my account from a technical standpoint. We have been able to retain every single client whenever the relationship made sense. We even gained more clients. We had to create a new culture, coming from a company that was over 100 years old to one that we wanted to behave like a start-up. We built three principles: fast, flat, and focus. We had many different layers in the past and eliminated those. Mexico is now part of our strategic markets and reports into the president of the company. Fast means being empowered to take decisions. Unlike many other corporations, decisions are taken at the country level. Our focus is the client because it is what matters. These changes don’t happen overnight, especially when expecting the same people who used to run the division in the past to act and think differently. Cultural change was therefore extremely important for us. We have accomplished a great deal in one year. We have the ability to attend to all the needs of our clients quickly. We are also able to engage with our partners to deliver the best value to our clients.