Kyndryl

In November 2021 IBM handed its managed infrastructure services unit to shareholders as a separate listed company. It came with roughly 90,000 employees and contracts to run data centres, networks and mainframes for banks, airlines and governments. The name is said to blend "kinship" and "tendril" — coined precisely so that it didn't mean anything yet.

Independence was the point: Kyndryl could now run workloads on AWS, Azure and Google Cloud without a conflict of interest, and signed deals with all three almost immediately. The business model resembles that of its near-sibling DXC: big, long contracts on thin margins, in a market that shrinks as customers move to the cloud.