Overview
- IBM notified employees of Gerstner’s passing in an email from CEO Arvind Krishna and offered condolences to his family.
- Appointed in 1993 as the first outsider to lead IBM, he rejected a breakup and recast the company as a neutral integrator centered on services and middleware.
- His overhaul featured aggressive cost cutting, sales of noncore assets, roughly 35,000 job reductions, the end of OS/2, and strategic buys such as Lotus and Tivoli.
- Services revenue rose from about $7.4 billion in 1992 to roughly $30 billion by 2001 as IBM’s market value climbed sharply during his nine-year tenure.
- After retiring in 2002, he chaired the Carlyle Group and focused on philanthropy, while industry leaders including AMD’s Lisa Su shared tributes to his influence.