Red Hat, Inc. is an open-source solution provider. It announced that it has named Matt Hicks as its president and chief executive officer. Hicks previously worked as Red Hat’s executive vice president of Products and Technologies. He takes over the role of Paul Cormier, who will serve as the chairman of Red Hat.
Product and technology chief is the new CEO
Matt Hicks joined the company in 2006 as a developer on the IT team. He is known as a hands-on leader within Red Hat. He quickly rose to leadership positions across the organization. Hicks was a foundational member of the engineering team that developed Red Hat OpenShift. As executive vice president of Products and Technologies, Hicks was responsible for Red Hat’s product strategy and engineering.
Hicks’ leadership helped Red Hat’s open hybrid cloud strategy and portfolio expand and help customers build, deploy and manage any application, anywhere, from the on-premises to multiple clouds, and the edge. This includes launching new managed cloud services that support customers to speed the development of cloud-native applications, and new capabilities to advance AI development.
Open-source can unlock the world’s potential
Hicks is well-regarded for his work with customers and partners to solve the next generation of IT challenges with open source innovation. Upon his appointment as president and CEO of Red Hat, Matt Hicks said;
« When I first joined Red Hat, I was passionate about open source and our mission, and I wanted to be a part of that. I am humbled and energized to be stepping into this role at this moment. There has never been a more exciting time to be in our industry and the opportunity in front of Red Hat is vast. I’m ready to roll up my sleeves and prove that open source technology truly can unlock the world’s potential. »
Previous CEO of Red Hat Paul Cormier, who was named president and CEO in 2020, has a 21-year of experience at Red Hat. He took a great role in the expansion of Red Hat’s portfolio to a full, modern IT stack based on open source innovation. He transformed Red Hat Linux from a freely downloadable operating system to a subscription model with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), which was a crucial moment.
Red Hat was acquired by International Business Machine Corp (IBM) for about $34 billion in 2019. With this acquisition, IBM hoped to differentiate itself in the crowded cloud market by aiming to become a hybrid model. The hybrid model helps clients to store and analyze information across their own data centers, private cloud services, and servers run by major public providers such as Amazon.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp.