When Ginni Rometty indicated that she was stepping down as IBM CEO at the end of January, the company announced that Arvind Krishna would be taking over, while Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst would become president. To fill his role, Red Hat announced today that long-time executive Paul Cormier has been named president and CEO.
Cormier would seem to be a logical choice to run Red Hat, having been with the company since 2001. He joined as its VP of engineering and has seen the company grow from a small startup to a multi-billion dollar company.
Cormier spoke about the historical arc he has witnessed in his years at Red Hat. “Looking back to when I joined, we were in a different position and facing different issues, but the spirit was the same. We were on a mission to convince the world that open source was real, safe and enterprise-grade,” Cormier said in an email to employees about his promotion.
Former CEO Whitehurst certainly sees this as a sensible transition. “After working with him closely for more than a decade, I can confidently say that Paul was the natural choice to lead Red Hat. Having been the driving force behind Red Hat’s product strategy for nearly two decades, he’s been intimately involved in setting the company’s direction and uniquely understands how to help customers and partners make the most out of their cloud strategy,” he said in a statement.
In a Q&A with Cormier on the company website, he talked about the kind of changes he expects to see under his leadership in the next five years of the company. “There’s a term that we use today, ‘applications run the business.’ In five years, I see it becoming the case for the majority of enterprises. And with that, the infrastructure underpinning these applications will be even more critical. Management and security are paramount — and this isn’t just one environment. It’s bare metal and hypervisors to public and private clouds. It’s Linux, VMs, containers, microservices and more,” he said.
When IBM bought Red Hat in 2018 for $34 billion, there was widespread speculation that Whitehurst would eventually take over in an executive position there. Now that that has happened, Cormier will step into run Red Hat.
While Red Hat is under the IBM umbrella, it continues to operate as a separate company with its own executive structure, but that vision that Cormier outlined is in line with how it will fit within the IBM family as it tries to make its mark on the shifting cloud and enterprise open source markets.
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