Red Hat announced that it has named Paul Cormier as president and chief executive officer of Red Hat, effective now. Cormier, who previously served as Red Hat’s president of Products and Technologies, succeeds Jim Whitehurst, who is now president of IBM.
Cormier is credited with pioneering the subscription model that transformed Red Hat from an open source “disruptor” to an enterprise technology company, 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 percent of Fortune 500 organisations.
Cormier has driven more than 25 acquisitions at Red Hat, moving the company beyond its Linux roots and helped create a modern IT stack based on open source.
