IBM Cloud Platform Exec Boville Takes DXC AI Role
Boville assumed the role of DXC executive vice president and global lead of applications services and AI.
Howard Boville
Howard Boville – IBM’s senior vice president of the IBM Cloud Platform, technology lifecycle services (TLS) and cybersecurity – has left the vendor and joined publicly traded solution provider DXC Technology.
Ashburn, Va.-based DXC – No. 10 on CRN’s 2023 Solution Provider 500 – announced the move in a Friday statement and Boville himself made the new public on LinkedIn.
Boville assumed the role of DXC executive vice president and global lead of applications services and artificial intelligence (AI). He started Friday and reports directly to Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer Mike Salvino, according to the statement.
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CRN has reached out to DXC and Boville for comment.
Armonk, N.Y.-based IBM confirmed to CRN in a statement that Boville’s successor is Alan Peacock, who was promoted to the role of IBM Cloud general manager in July, according to Peacock’s LinkedIn account.
According to DXC’s statement, Boville will “work with our teams and customers to modernize Applications and use AI to ultimately help DXC grow revenues and expand margin, EPS and FCF.“
“We are delighted to welcome Howard to the DXC leadership team,” Salvino said in the statement. “He is an IT Services expert with proven experience in creating growth strategies and executing against them, which we will apply to Applications and AI.”
In the DXC statement, Boville said he is “honored to join DXC at this exciting moment in the company’s history.”
“DXC not only serves the essential needs of the world’s most important companies but is also helping them to navigate the intersection of new technology and market opportunity,” Boville said. “I am excited to lead Applications Services and AI, to help our customers simplify, modernize and accelerate their strategies and be a catalyst for DXC growth for Applications and AI.”
Boville’s LinkedIn post received more than 900 reactions and more than 190 comments.
Notable LinkedIn users who congratulated Boville include:
*Tom Whaley, chief sales officer at mParticle
*Marty Falaro, EVP and chief operating officer at Wasabi Technologies
*Rolf Holman, Falconwood chief strategy officer
*Thomas Edde, chief strategy officer at Gamestate
*Kevin Sparks, Onnec chief revenue and growth officer
*Alex Hesterberg, Superna CEO
*Vinod Subramanian, Syapse chief data and product development officer
*Aly Farooqui, IBM Cloud for Financial Services chief risk officer
*Maria Flynn, Jobs for the Future CEO
*Shekar Ayyar, Arrcus CEO
*Steve Prather, Dizzion CEO
*Robert Cornish, Richter CEO
*Ali Khan, CEO for federal, state, local, education and commercial at USA Technology Consultants
*Gavin Patterson, former Salesforce president and chief strategy officer
*Phil Walton, PW Global CEO
Dayal Bhagat, president and chief technology officer of CMIT Solutions of Roanoke
Boville came to IBM in 2020 after more than seven years with Bank of America, according to his LinkedIn account. Boville left the firm with the title of chief technology officer.
Peacock joined IBM in 2021 as GM of IBM Cloud delivery and operations.
Like Boville, Peacock came to IBM from the banking and financial services world. Peacock worked at HSBC for more than five years before joining IBM, according to his LinkedIn account. He left HSBC with the title of chief technology officer, global head of IT infrastructure delivery and chief information officer for Asia Pacific. Peacock also spent time with Lloyds Banking Group and the Royal Bank of Scotland.
Meet Cloud GM Peacock
In a recent interview with CRN about IBM’s partnership with VMware, Peacock said that partnership speaks to IBM’s open organization strategy to meet clients where they are at while still investing in technological advancements within.
“Our goal is to make the IBM Cloud proposition the best on the planet, but we’re also a more open organization than historically,” Peacock said. “If clients have a preference to go run some of this stuff on another provider or on-prem, then we’re going to make that available. I think that that is definitely, on an IBM level, a differentiator for us.”
Peacock said he learned the importance of flexibility with clients while at HSBC. As a client, he would not “want to be forced down a certain route.”
“I want to have options that fit with my business model,” he said.
When asked by CRN about IBM’s differentiators as a cloud vendor, Peacock said IBM’s variety of product packages and payment models along with capabilities in areas including enterprise-grade AI, security and compliance means customers are more likely to trust them with mission critical workloads for cloud migration.
“We run for a large client in France their instant payments system, so it doesn’t get any more critical for a bank than that,” he said. “For a bank in the U.K., we are running their credit card platform. Again, mission critical. For a bank in the U.S., we are running their high-performance computing environment. It does all of the risk calculations, Monte Carlo calculations. So we are starting to see that our differentiated platform is bringing those workloads to us now. … We’ve got a unique proposition that is already getting traction with those workloads.”