James Kavanaugh

CFO & Senior VP, Ibm

Search every verified James Kavanaugh interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. In a January 2019 CNBC interview, IBM CFO Jim Kavanaugh discussed the company's cloud business and the pending acquisition of Red Hat. He stated that IBM's cloud business generated $19.2 billion for the full year, up 12 percent, and that cloud revenue accelerated across all segments from the third to the fourth quarter. Kavanaugh attributed some of the quarterly cloud performance to a product cycle dynamic involving IBM's mainframe business, which grew 71 percent in the fourth quarter of 2017 and continued to accelerate through 2018. He said that without the mainframe, cloud was up 19 percent overall. Kavanaugh described the Red Hat acquisition as a move to "accelerate the leadership position in hybrid cloud." He noted that IBM had invested in its cloud architecture, data centers, and new offerings such as IBM Cloud Private and cloud migration services. He characterized the industry as moving into a second phase of cloud computing, which he said would involve "shifting workloads, mission-critical workloads on real business value," and estimated that "80-plus percent of the workloads are still ahead of us." Kavanaugh also remarked that Linux had surpassed Microsoft in operating systems both on-premises and in the cloud, and said that with the combination of IBM and Red Hat, "we own the starting point and we now own the destination point." He stated that the acquisition was working through regulatory approval and was expected to close in the second half of 2019.