Red Hat announced that it has named Paul Cormier as president and chief executive officer of Red Hat, effective today. Cormier, who previously served as Red Hat’s president of Products and Technologies, succeeds Jim Whitehurst, who is now president of IBM.
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.
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.
During his tenure at Red Hat, Whitehurst oversaw Red Hat’s expansion and increasing influence across the technology industry including growing revenue from more than $500 million to almost $3 billion for the company’s 2018 fiscal year, as well as the landmark acquisition of Red Hat by IBM for $34 billion in 2019. Under his leadership, Red Hat was named to Forbes’ list of “The World’s Most Innovative Companies” six times and named to Fortune’s list of the Most Admired Companies in 2019 and 2020. In addition to his new role as president of IBM, Whitehurst becomes chairman of Red Hat, succeeding Arvind Krishna, who is now CEO of IBM.
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