Good morning from the Newsroom of the Financial Times.

Today is Friday, January 31st,

and this is your FT news briefing.

Amazon's one day shipping delivered a bumper holiday sale season for the company. The World Health Organization

declared an international emergency over the coronavirus and with the UK

set to leave the EU this evening we'll take a look at what Boris Johnson has

planned next.

But first, Jeannie Rometi has stepped down as IBM's chief executive.

The F.T.'s Richard Waters has more on why Big Blue decided to go in a new direction.

I'm Mark Filipino, and here's the news you need to start your day.

So on Thursday, Ginny Romatti, who has run IBM for eight years, and now she was stepping down in April.

Technologist, head of R&D, and also IBM's cloud business is taking over.

It's a very significant transition at a time when IBM is really trying

to reinvent itself for cloud computing.

So Arvin Krishna is in as IBM's next chief executive and Rometi is out. Was there pressure for her to step down?

Rometi has really struggled over the last few years.

IBM first tried to be a big public cloud computing company itself like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft

Zure and it under invested and it was too late and that was a failing strategy.

IBM's revenues have just been shrinking for years.

I think the significant thing here is that she really took a big gamble about a year and a half

ago paying out $34 billion for software company Red Hat in the

hopes that this would be a new strategy for IBM and the mastermind behind that deal is

...