********************************************************************************
*                                                                              *
*                               ### Spinning off ###                           *
*                                                                              *
*                                   June 20, 2022                              *
*                                                                              *
********************************************************************************

It's been about two years since Anthem (now Elevance Health) outsourced a large
part of the IT staff to IBM. It will be a year, come September, since IBM
spun-off the Global Technology Services division to become it's own company
named Kyndryl. Weird name, but it seems like that's the standard for companies
these days. 

This first year has been a whirlwind of activity. The technical staff continues
to support customers as we did under IBM. There is still a remnant of IBM
culture in Kyndryl though. IBM is/was a bureaucratic behemoth, and that's come
over to Kyndryl--which kind of makes sense as it's a former appendage of Big
Blue. The C-Suite managers are hoping to make Kyndryl nimble to compete against
its peers (think Tata, CSC, Covansys, and other Managed Service Providers), but
it sounds like the Big Blue Bureaucracy is still alive and well within the
company.

There is a big push for getting certified in cloud technologies. That's fine...I
know some folks will get caught up in getting pieces of paper that say that they
can AWS, Azure, and cloud better than other people. I'm not opposed to it and
tried to go through the process of AWS certification but didn't. I decided to go
in a different direction: getting my Master of Science in Cybersecurity at
Georgia Tech. I feel like that will give me a bit more exposure to what is
needed, and the degree will have weight in the industry.

A downside to being spun-off from a large, recognizable company is that people
respond with "huh?" when you tell them you work for Kyndryl. It was a lot easier
to explain when working for IBM. Kyndryl "used to be IBM", but it's no longer
IBM. Will that help or hurt in the long-run? I don't know. One think I'm
confident about is that they will need to compete with other companies like
Microsoft, Amazon, and others to attract and keep talent.