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When IBM took over the Linux supplier Red Hat for $34 Billion in 2019, Paul Cormier took over as CEO of Red Hat. After three years, Cormier hands those reins over to a new leader.
Yesterday, Red Hat announced that Matt Hicks, the company’s longtime technical leader, will now become the company’s president and CEO. Cormier will fulfill the role of Chairman, where he will continue to actively participate in the company’s activities.
In an interview with VentureBeat, both Cormier and Hicks emphasized that now is the right time for a CEO transition.
“When IBM took us over three years ago, I personally thought, I’ve been here 21 years, maybe it was the right time, but there was still a lot of unfinished business for me to wrap up,” Cormier said.
The unfinished business was the establishment of Red Hat as a standalone operating entity within IBM as the company continued to grow. As chairman, Cormier will remain active as he helps lead a strategic client advisory board and reviews potential acquisition opportunities.
During his tenure at Red Hat, Cormier helped oversee more than 20 acquisitions and he expects more in the future as the company continues to build on its application development, security and hybrid cloud capabilities.
Red Hat’s new CEO is technical to the core
While Cormier has long had a product focus, Matt Hicks joined Red Hat in 2005 as an engineer.
“I’m a long-term, open source believer,” Hick told VentureBeat. “I started my career with Linux.”
Hicks became known to Red Hat in 2012 as Director of OpenShift Engineering. Red Hat acquired a platform as a service provider called Makara in 2010 and rebranded the technology as OpenShift. The original Makara code didn’t quite work, and Red Hat rebuilt and refocused OpenShift as a container and Kubernetes based system† OpenShift is now at the core of Red Hat’s overall strategy to enable enterprise hybrid and multicloud application workloads.
Hicks explained that Red Hat Enterprise Linux, a product Cormier helped bring to market nearly 20 years ago, created that foundational platform for enterprises to run applications. Running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, OpenShift extends the platform and supports distributed workloads that can be run on-premises and across multiple cloud providers.
“Red Hat Enterprise Linux offers tremendous value for individual machines, and customers have done a fantastic job building complex architectures with it,” said Hicks. “With OpenShift, you can take hundreds or thousands of those machines and have them act as one thing for distributed computing.”
While Hicks will now be responsible for Red Hat’s overall performance as the company’s CEO, he’s hopeful he won’t stray far from his tech roots. Over the past three years, he noted that he has taken on an increasing corporate role as executive vice president for products and technologies, a role Cormier held before becoming CEO.
“I’ve had a few years of experience with the shift to really focus on the business and the nice thing is that I can fall back on my intuition for open source engineering because I’ve been doing that for a long time,” Hicks said.
Red Hat’s roadmap leads to the Edge and more AI
Red Hat has no shortage of competition in multiple market segments.
In the core Linux market, Red Hat competes with Suus LinuxCanonical and his Ubuntu Linux† There are also multiple vendors that have Linux distributions based on Red Hat, including Oracle, Rocky Linux and Alma Linux. On the OpenShift side, Red Hat competes with VMware, dockr and Mirantis, among other vendors, all of which offer Kubernetes container orchestration capabilities.
While Hicks is well aware of the competition, he noted that his challenge is to enable a wide range of capabilities from the hybrid cloud to the edge and support those technologies for the long term. Hicks pointed to Red Hat’s recent announcement with General Motorsintegrating Red Hat technologies into cars, exemplifying his company’s value proposition.
“The life cycle of a car is very long and if they’re looking for a partner to work with, that’s a 10-year gamble,” Hicks said. “That’s something we’ve shown we can do in the data center.”
Looking ahead, a key area of innovation for Red Hat will be the AI space as organizations of all sizes look to take advantage of machine learning.
“We invest a lot in the MLops space because our role has always been about how we help you get code from a developer’s fingertips to production,” Hicks said.
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