IBM last night named Virginia Rometty, the head of sales, marketing and strategy, to take over as chief executive on January 1, making her the first woman to lead the US computer giant.
The 54-year-old, who is also a senior vice president at IBM, succeeds current president and chief executive Samuel Palmisano, 60, who will stay on as chairman of the board of directors, IBM said in a statement.
Rometty had also been elected to IBM's board of directors, effective immediately, the company said. She will be the ninth chief executive in the 100-year-old history of the computer titan known as "Big Blue" and the first woman to hold the top post.
A regular on Fortune Magazine's list of the "50 Most Powerful Women in Business," Rometty joins a select group of women heading US technology firms. They include Ursula Burns, the chief executive at Xerox, and Meg Whitman, the former chief executive of eBay who was recently named to the same post at Hewlett-Packard.
Since becoming CEO of IBM in 2002, Palmisano has presided notably over the sale of its personal computer business to China's Lenovo in 2005 and its focus on computer servers, services and software.
In a statement, the outgoing chief executive said Rometty "has successfully led several of IBM's most important businesses over the past decade" and is the "ideal CEO to lead IBM into its second century."
