Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, has named Matt Hicks as its president and chief executive officer.
Red Hat’s current CEO Paul Cormier will serve as chairman of Red Hat.
Matt Hicks joined Red Hat in 2006 as a developer on the IT team. He rose via leadership positions across the organization, helping Red Hat solidify itself as the open hybrid cloud technology leader. Matt Hicks was a foundational member of the engineering team that developed Red Hat OpenShift which is now serving as the industry’s leading enterprise Kubernetes platform.
Paul Cormier, who was named president and CEO in 2020, has a 21-year tenure at Red Hat and during that time he has driven much of the company’s open hybrid cloud strategy, playing an instrumental role in the expansion of Red Hat’s portfolio to a modern IT stack based on open source innovation, as per a news statement from Red Hat.
His efforts to transform Red Hat Linux from a freely downloadable operating system to a subscription model with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), was a pivotal moment. RHEL is now the industry’s leading enterprise Linux platform, powering more than 90 percent of Fortune 500 organizations and touching $13 trillion in global business revenues in 2022.
Paul Cormier’s focus will be on scaling the company and accelerating customer adoption of open source technology to build their open hybrid cloud architecture. Paul Cormier led more than 26 acquisitions at Red Hat. Paul Cormier will also work closely with Red Hat leadership on future M&A strategy.
Since Red Hat’s acquisition by IBM in 2019, Paul Cormier has been instrumental in scaling and accelerating Red Hat while maintaining the company’s market neutrality. He will work alongside IBM chairman and CEO, Arvind Krishna in this capacity. Both Paul Cormier and Matt Hicks will report to Arvind Krishna.
