Red Hat has named Paul Cormier as the new president and chief executive officer for the company and succeeds Jim Whitehurst, who is now president of IBM.
Paul Cormier, the new president and CEO of Red Hat
Since joining Red Hat in 2001, Cormier’s leadership and vision have driven major strategy shifts and expansion of the company’s portfolio of products and services. Cormier is credited with pioneering the subscription model that transformed Red Hat from an open source disruptor to an enterprise technology mainstay, moving Red Hat Linux from a freely downloadable operating system to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the industry’s leading enterprise Linux platform that today powers more than 90% of Fortune 500 organizations.
Cormier has driven more than 25 acquisitions at Red Hat, moving the company well beyond its Linux roots and helped create a full, modern IT stack based on open source innovation that disrupted the IT industry. The availability of true enterprise-grade open source products across the technology stack and changing business models have made open source a de facto source of innovation in the software industry, resulting in faster progress than proprietary vendors could provide alone.
Commenting on his new role Cormier, said “When I joined Red Hat, it would have been impossible to predict how Linux and open source would change our world, but they are truly everywhere. The transformations I see happening in our industry are exciting, as they present new challenges and opportunities. The opportunity for Red Hat has never been bigger than it is today and I am honored to lead the company to help our customers solve their challenges and to keep Red Hat at the forefront of innovation.”
The CEO for IBM, Arvind Krishna said “Red Hat is synonymous with open source and hybrid cloud – two of the biggest driving forces in our industry. Paul’s deep engineering skills, product expertise and industry vision make him the right leader to capitalize on this opportunity and fuel Red Hat’s continued technology innovation and accelerated growth.”
