How Kyndryl’s alliance strategy accelerates enterprise transformation

Giovanni Carraro: The most successful technology services companies are those that forge strategic partnerships to drive customer adoption and foster innovation. As an independent company, we’ve leveraged our freedom to build a broad ecosystem and co-create scalable solutions with AWS, Google and Microsoft, alongside other technology partners. This approach lets us deliver integrated solutions that fit our customers’ needs and help them modernize their mission-critical systems and speed AI adoption, all in a secure and resilient environment.

Carraro: Kyndryl’s alliance strategy was critical to our own transformation into a services provider, and — along with our people — is essential to our growth story. Kyndryl went from $0 hyperscaler business when we spun off as an independent firm in 2021, to $1.2 billion in revenue tied to our hyperscaler alliances in fiscal 2025. Our teams have achieved over 43,000 public cloud certifications, doubling year-over-year, along with attaining premier-tier partnerships. We’ve co-created solutions like ‘100 AI agents in 100 days’ with Google, launched specialized offerings with AWS and Microsoft — including mainframe modernization and generative AI services — and built solutions to address a variety of industry-specific challenges. In addition, our AI Innovation Labs (developed with the hyperscalers) are enabling hands-on co-creation with customers. Together, we strive to continuously deliver innovation, competitive differentiation and business outcomes that are aligned to our customers’ unique requirements.

Carraro: Customers seek to reduce complexity in their IT environments. They’re looking for industry-specific solutions that address their business problems, optimize their IT investments and are scalable and secure. We see ourselves as ecosystem orchestrators, bringing together the best technologies from our partners and integrating them into comprehensive solutions. We come with a point of view on how to best leverage our partners’ technologies, aligned to the specific needs of our customers — whether it’s public, private or hybrid cloud, on-premises, applications, security, or data and AI. With our partners, we combine our deep technology and vertical expertise, and our understanding of customer challenges, context and constraints to deliver differentiated solutions that help enable positive business results.

Carraro: We start by listening to the customer and analyzing their business and technology landscape. Then we co-create tailored solutions that combine our technical expertise with the best of our partners’ platforms and solutions. Unlike a “lift-and-shift" or one-size-fits-all approach, we focus on orchestrating end-to-end transformations to help customers modernize their IT environment and leverage AI while supporting their security, resiliency and compliance needs. We tailor our solutions with industry-specific reference architectures and compliance modules. All of this results in faster time-to-value, higher adoption rates and better business outcomes for our customers.

Carraro: Our alliance-driven approach has delivered measurable results across multiple industries. For example, we migrated a healthcare provider’s core medical records to AWS to help them improve patient care, reduce treatment and login times and enable them to manage compliance with their regulatory obligations. Furthermore, by modernizing a manufacturer’s SAP systems on Microsoft Azure, we unified data across multiple companies, increased manufacturing efficiency by 15% and enabled real-time analytics. And with Google Cloud, we developed AI-powered training tools for a retail organization that standardized global customer service, reduced operational costs and accelerated onboarding.