Red Hat Appoints Matt Hicks as President and Chief Executive Officer

Red Hat has announced that it has named Matt Hicks as its president and chief executive officer. Hicks, who previously served as Red Hat’s executive vice president of Products and Technologies, succeeds Paul Cormier, who will serve as chairman of Red Hat.

Hicks, a hands-on leader within Red Hat, joined the firm in 2006 as a developer on the IT team. He quickly progressed through the ranks of the organization, assisting Red Hat in solidifying its position as the open hybrid cloud technology leader. Most notably, Hicks was a founding member of the engineering team that created Red Hat OpenShift, which has developed into the backbone for hybrid cloud deployments across sectors and is now the industry’s leading enterprise Kubernetes platform. Since then, he has remained at the vanguard of hybrid cloud computing and Red Hat’s product strategy.

As executive vice president of Products and Technologies, Hicks was responsible for the entirety of Red Hat’s product strategy and engineering. Notably, under Hicks’ leadership, Red Hat’s open hybrid cloud strategy and portfolio have expanded to help customers build, deploy and manage any application, anywhere, from on-premises environment, to multiple clouds, and to the edge. This includes delivering new managed cloud services that help customers speed the development of cloud-native applications, new capabilities to accelerate AI development, product variants enabling edge use cases, and new security approaches that span hybrid cloud environments.

Open source software is the IT industry’s innovation engine. With more than 25 years of experience in Linux, a background in computer engineering, industry vision, and business acumen, Hicks is well-regarded for his work with customers and partners to solve the next generation of IT challenges with open-source innovation.

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 full, modern IT stack based on open source innovation. 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. His leadership solidified Red Hat as an industry leader and paved the way for the open innovation that is at the heart of the hybrid cloud and modern IT. 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. With RHEL as the foundation for open hybrid cloud, Red Hat is creating the future of enterprise IT.

Cormier championed an open hybrid cloud vision before much of the industry, allowing customers to deliver any app, anywhere on any infrastructure, from the edge and bare metal to various public clouds in a common, more consistent manner. As chairman, he will continue to work with customers to help them realize that ambition. Cormier will be Red Hat’s strategic touchstone and key advisor in his new position. His focus will remain to scale the company and boost customer acceptance of open source technology in order to build their open hybrid cloud architecture. Cormier, who has overseen more than 26 acquisitions at Red Hat, will also engage closely with Red Hat leadership on future M&A strategies. Cormier has been crucial in expanding and accelerating Red Hat since the company’s acquisition by IBM in 2019. In this capacity, he will continue to work with IBM Chairman and CEO Arvind Krishna. Both Cormier and Hicks will report to Krishna.