8 Big New Revelations About IBM’s Kyndryl Spin-Off

A new regulatory filing uncovers details about Kyndryl’s business and operations, including financial results for the past several years, workforce reductions, the competitive landscape and vendor partnerships.

Vendor Partnerships

Following the spin-off from IBM, Kyndryl and IBM will “continue to have a strong commercial relationship,” IBM said in its own SEC filing on Tuesday. As part of this relationship, Kyndryl said in its filing that it plans to “enter into an Intellectual Property Agreement with IBM, pursuant to which IBM will grant to us perpetual and irrevocable, non-exclusive, royalty-free licenses to certain proprietary software and documentation, databases, trade secrets, and certain other intellectual property rights (excluding patents and trademarks) that are used in the Business but are being retained by IBM.”

“The foregoing license excludes IBM’s commercial software, which will be subject to IBM’s standard commercial terms if we choose to use it in the Business,” Kyndryl said.

Beyond working with IBM, Kyndryl mentioned just a few other vendor partners by name in the filing—VMware, Microsoft and ServiceNow—but said that partnerships with additional vendors is part of the plan.

“We have a strong and long-standing foundation developed by governing and managing complex technology environments, including IBM (e.g., Red Hat and Cloud Paks) and third-party technologies (e.g., VMWare, ServiceNow, and Microsoft),” Kyndryl said in the filing. “With increased freedom of action, we will extend these capabilities to an even broader ecosystem of technology providers and develop more services that are digitally consumable to expand accessibility to new customers and markets.”