It is the first month of a new year, and this is the time that IBM traditionally does reorganizations of its business lines and plays musical chairs with its executives to reconfigure itself for the coming year. And just like clockwork, late last week the top brass at Big Blue did internal announcements explaining the changes it is making to transform its wares into a platform better suited to the times. The first big change, and one that may have precipitated all of the others that have been set in place, is Robert LeBlanc, who is the senior vice president of the IBM Cloud division, will be retiring after 36 years at the company. Like many of the people currently in charge at IBM, LeBlanc came up through the software side of the company, and in this case LeBlanc was in charge of the Tivoli systems management suite after its acquisition for $743 million back in February 1996. (This Tivoli deal, along with the $3.5 billion deal to buy groupware maker Lotus in June 1995, gave IBM a credible software business outside of its proprietary mainframes and midrange systems.) In various senior leadership roles, LeBlanc has managed various middleware stacks as well as worldwide software sales, and a year ago was made senior vice president of the Software and Cloud Solutions Group, the part of the former Software Group behemoth that was disaggregated when Steve Mills, who headed up Systems Group and Software Group together, himself retired. More recently, LeBlanc was in charge of the IBM Cloud division, the new name for the amalgamation of the SoftLayer public cloud, which IBM bought in June 2013 for $2 billion, and various application hosting business it ran itself plus the various Watson services it sells. Learn more at https://www.nextplatform.com/2017/01/24/ibm-reorg-forges-cognitive-systems-merges-cloud-analytics/