When Ginni Rometty announced in late January that she would step down as IBM CEO, the company announced that Arvind Krishna would take over as Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst would become president. To fulfill his role, Red Hat announced today that longtime CEO Paul Cormier has been named President and CEO.
Cormier appears to be a logical choice to lead Red Hat, who has been with the company since 2001. He joined as vice president of engineering and has seen the company grow from a small startup to a billion dollar company.
Cormier spoke about the historical bow he saw at Red Hat in his years. “When I look back when I got there, we were in a different position and faced different problems, but the mind was the same. We had a mission to convince the world that open source was real, secure, and enterprise-ready, ”said Cormier in an email to the employees about his promotion.
Former CEO Whitehurst certainly sees this as a sensible transition. “After working closely with him for over a decade, I can confidently say that Paul was the natural choice to run Red Hat. He has been the driving force behind Red Hat's product strategy for nearly two decades. He was instrumental in determining the direction of the company and has a unique understanding of how customers and partners can make the most of their cloud strategy, ”he said in a statement.
In a Q&A with Cormier on the company's website, he spoke about the kind of changes he will expect under his leadership over the next five years of the company. "There is a term we use today:" Applications run the business. "In five years, I will see that most companies do, making the infrastructure on which these applications are based even more critical. Management and Security comes first – and it's not just an environment, it's bare metal and hypervisor for public and private clouds, Linux, VMs, containers, microservices and more, ”he said.
When IBM bought Red Hat for $ 34 billion in 2018, there was widespread speculation that Whitehurst would eventually take the lead there. Now that this is done, Cormier will launch Red Hat.
While Red Hat is under the IBM The company continues to be an independent company with its own management structure. However, the vision outlined by Cormier answers the question of how it fits into the IBM family when it tries to distinguish itself in the changing cloud and enterprise open source markets.
