Matt Hicks is the new CEO of Red Hat, Pail Cormier led the open source company for just two years.
With Matt Hicks, the Red Hat headed by a new CEO and President. He replaces Paul Cormier, who has headed the IBM subsidiary since 2020. However, the latter remains with the open source provider as CEO. Red Hat does not give a reason for the remarkably rapid change in its top managers.
Hicks has been with Red Hat since 2006 and most recently held the position of vice president for products and technologies. Before joining the company’s management team, he started his career as a developer. He is jointly responsible for OpenShift and later the provider’s hybrid cloud strategy, as the announcement of the change underlines.
In his first message as CEO to the more than 20,000 employees, Hicks emphasizes two aspects of his future management in particular : Open Source is best suited to solve the problems in IT and the world in general. And employees should be able to discuss ideas openly and with respect – even if everyone doesn’t always agree.
Red Hat’s longtime CEO Jim Whitehurst joined Big Blue’s management team after it was acquired by IBM. The open source company has belonged to IBM since mid-2019, which cost the group $34 billion. With Lennart Poettering, Red Hat also lost a key Linux figure this year, he switched to Microsoft.
