Virginia M. Rometty
| Ginni Rometty | |
|---|---|
Rometty at the 2011 Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit
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| Born |
Virginia Marie Nicosia July 29, 1957 Chicago, Illinois, United States |
| Nationality | American |
| Education | Northwestern University (B.S.) |
| Occupation | chairman, president, and CEO of IBM |
| Salary | US$19.3 million (2014) |
| Predecessor | Samuel J. Palmisano |
Virginia Marie "Ginni" Rometty (born July 29, 1957) is an American business executive. She is the current chairman, president, and CEO of IBM, and the first woman to head the company. Prior to becoming president and CEO in January 2012, she held the positions of senior vice president and group executive for sales, marketing, and strategy at IBM. She joined IBM as a systems engineer in its Detroit office in 1981.
Rometty's tenure as CEO has been marked by prestigious awards including by Bloomberg who named her among the 50 Most Influential People in the World, and Fortune naming her among the "50 Most Powerful Women in Business" for ten consecutive years. Her tenure as CEO has been met by criticism related to executive compensation, outsourcing, and IBM's 21 consecutive quarters of revenue decline.
Rometty graduated from the Robert R. McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science at Northwestern University in 1979 with high honors, receiving a bachelor's degree in computer science and electrical engineering. Rometty was a member of the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority, eventually serving as its president.
After graduation in 1979, Rometty went to work for General Motors Institute; in 1981, she joined IBM as a systems engineer in its Detroit office. She joined IBM's Consulting Group in 1991. In 2002, she "championed the purchase of the big business consulting firm, PricewaterhouseCoopers Consulting, for $3.5 billion." Rometty became senior vice president and group executive for sales, marketing, and strategy in 2009 and is "credited with spearheading IBM's growth strategy by getting the company into the cloud computing and analytics businesses. She was also at the helm of readying Watson, the Jeopardy! playing computer, for commercial use."
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