IBM’s Red Hat Names Its Third CEO In Four Years

Red Hat has named Matt Hicks as its President and CEO. His predecessor, Paul Cormier, will serve as the open source solutions provider’s Chairman.

Hicks is the third person to lead Red Hat since it was acquired by computing giant IBM for $34 billion in July 2019—Cormier took over from Jim Whitehurst in April 2020.

Hicks, who previously served as Red Hat’s EVP of Products and Technologies, first joined the company in 2006 as a developer on the IT team.

“When I first joined Red Hat, I was passionate about open source and our mission, and I wanted to be a part of that,” Hicks said in the company’s announcement. “There has never been a more exciting time to be in our industry and the opportunity in front of Red Hat is vast.”

Hicks was a foundational member of the engineering team that developed Red Hat OpenShift, a family of containerization software products that has grown into the backbone for hybrid cloud deployments. He is well-regarded for his work with customers and partners to solve the next generation of IT challenges with open-source innovation.

Last quarter, Red Hat’s revenue grew 17%, largely fueled by the adoption and expansion of RHEL and OpenShift across the financial services, public sector and telecommunications industries.

On IBM’s earnings call earlier this week, Chairman and CEO Arvind Krishna said, “We feel very good about the Red Hat business, and we see very strong demand continuing. That said, we had said late last year that we expect growth in Red Hat to be in the upper teens. We continue to make that expectation.”

It will now fall on Hicks to maintain Red Hat’s momentum in the face of economic headwinds that could cause businesses to slash spending.

Moving forward, Hicks says Red Hat will work to refine its playbook and focus on delivering platforms that “enable customer success from on-premises environments to cloud services and at the edge.” In a letter to employees, he added, “In this simplification, I also want us to reinvigorate the core of Red Hat’s value–what we give to customers that others can’t. We make customers successful with open source software.”

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