Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, names Paul Cormier as the new president and chief executive officer of Red Hat.
Cormier, whose leadership and vision have driven major strategy shifts and expansion of the company’s portfolio of products and services since joining Red Hat in 2001, succeeds Jim Whitehurst, who is now president of IBM.
He 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 percent of Fortune 500 organisations.
“After working with him closely for more than a decade, I can confidently say that Paul was the natural choice to lead Red Hat,” Jim Whitehurst, president, IBM, said, adding that Cormier is a proven leader and his commitment to open source principles and ways of working will enable Red Hat not only to keep pace with the demands of enterprise IT, but also lead the way as emerging technologies break into the mainstream.
“It was my honor and privilege to lead a company filled with many of our industry’s best and brightest and I am excited to see what Red Hatters accomplish under Paul’s leadership,” Whitehurst added.
For more than a decade, Cormier has championed a vision for open hybrid cloud, giving customers the flexibility to deliver any app, anywhere on any infrastructure from the edge and bare metal to multiple public clouds in a common, consistent manner.
That vision helped establish Red Hat OpenShift, the industry’s most comprehensive enterprise Kubernetes platform, as a backbone of hybrid cloud deployments across industries.
Cormier has also forged industry-changing partnerships, including a landmark partnership with Microsoft to bring broader choice to hybrid cloud deployments.
He has been instrumental in Red Hat’s structural combination with IBM, focused on scaling and accelerating Red Hat while maintaining its independence and neutrality.
“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,” said Paul Cormier, president and CEO, Red Hat.
Arvind Krishna, CEO, IBM, quoted as saying that Paul’s deep engineering skills, product expertise and industry vision make him the right leader to capitalise on this opportunity and fuel Red Hat’s continued technology innovation and accelerated growth.
