
Paul Cormier Replaces Jim Whitehurst as Red Hat CEO - ldng
https://www.itprotoday.com/hybrid-cloud/paul-cormier-replaces-jim-whitehurst-red-hat-ceo
======
williamstein
Even more interesting

> "Red Hat's CEO for the past 12 years moves to take on the role of IBM
> president"

~~~
abrowne
Here's IBM release about that: [https://newsroom.ibm.com/2020-01-30-Arvind-
Krishna-Elected-I...](https://newsroom.ibm.com/2020-01-30-Arvind-Krishna-
Elected-IBM-Chief-Executive-Officer)

President seems like second-in-command, below CEO. (And the outgoing CEO was
both.) Am I understanding that right?

~~~
cpetty
Correct -- Ginni Rometty was CEO, President, and Chairman of the Board. She
remains Chairman, while Arvind Krishna is now CEO and Whitehurst is President.

This is the first time in a while that the IBM President & CEO roles have been
divided among two different people.

~~~
lowdose
The president title was a thing for people claiming the top spot without being
the founder. It doesn't make sense to split CEO & President role between two
people, but when the fable is told long enough the people who tell believe it
themselves.

~~~
cachestash
Its the co-CEO strategy, or two in box. Its becoming quite popular as of late.

~~~
stingraycharles
Why is that? I can’t imagine it going well for an extended period of time.

~~~
Jedd
> I can’t imagine it going well for an extended period of time.

Why is that?

I don't think there are many modern examples, but the idea of consensus based
decision making isn't new, and doesn't appear to be intrinsically flawed.

Consider the origin of the word triumvirate. While the first one ended less
than optimally for all concerned, we have a slightly less violent way of
dealing with organisational promotion and succession now.

Personally I _love_ the idea of having three equal heads of state, especially
if their decision and voting behaviours are obliged to be published.

But I also like the idea of proper democracy. I'm Australian, and I don't
think we have an actual democracy here - just a poor facsimile. I think in the
USA it's even more distant.

~~~
bhewes
The Swiss Federal Council is an example.

------
MelioRatio
If anyone wants to find out more on what Cormier wants to focus on over the
coming years, he did a small QnA: [https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/get-know-
red-hat-president-an...](https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/get-know-red-hat-
president-and-ceo-paul-cormier)

It will be interesting to see, how his management style is going to impact Red
Hat over the coming years. Considering his background and acumen, I feel like
there is going to be a stronger focus on tailored services and specific
solutions for organizations. They are already very active in the health care
and financial industry, so this could be an area they might expand.

~~~
stuff4ben
A lot of IBM products are in the cloud and the focus from Whitehurst as IBM
president is that cloud, containers/K8s/RHOSP, and edge are the big things
that will be going on. It will be very interesting to see how RH plays into
the broader IBM strategy. Will RH become the platform and IBM becomes tooling,
services, and products on top of that platform? Or will RH move to more
consultancy and enterprise IT services? Coming from Cisco where the acquired
company always gets folded into the mothership, I find it very interesting to
see IBM's stance of keeping RH alone and mostly separate. At least for now...

~~~
cachestash
its very possible and widely touted that it could go the other way, in that
Red Hat takes over IBM (culturally. Red Hat certainly has a strong enough
culture to do that.

------
freedomben
I work for Red Hat and wasn't going to comment (as I don't know Paul), but I
feel somewhat compelled by so much of the negativity here.

Red Hat, like all companies, is not a monolith. It's a huge mix of people from
different places, cultures, etc. It's a salad bowl of personalities, values,
and priorities.

Somehow we come together to make some amazing products. As I mentioned above I
can't comment on Paul because I don't know him, but I can comment on what I've
seen at Red Hat.

We are super forgiving about "license violations." I've never seen the "Oracle
tactics" and if I do, I'll probably quit. IBM is not infecting Red Hat, in
fact it's the other way around. I don't interact with IBM at all but from what
I've seen at a distance we are spreading our culture to them. I don't agree
with every policy of ours regarding RHEL and subscriptions, etc, as I feel it
disincentivizes community usage too much, but I've _never_ seen it used
punitively or aggressively against anyone, especially our customers.

I choose to remain optimistic that the future is bright, until there's actual
evidence that it may not be true. Jumping to conclusions early is at best
unproductive and at worst could become a self-fulfilling prophecy. I'm excited
to see what the future will bring.

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zapita
Good for Paul. He has wanted the CEO job forever, and was notoriously bitter
about being passed over last time.

Don’t expect a revolution in Red Hat’s strategy or culture. Paul was already
extremely influential, especially on product and R&D which are not Jim’s
strong suits.

Things to know about Paul:

\- He is very competitive and has a zero-sum approach to competition: for him
to win, someone else has to lose.

\- He has a bad temper. If you work on the same floor as him, you will hear
yelling.

\- He doesn’t shy away from Oracle-style tactics. Expect customer audits to
get more hardball; more aggressive use of anti-competitive bundling (“if you
use this competitor’s product on RHEL, we will not support that RHEL host”).

~~~
BaronVonSteuben
As someone who is a big fan of Red Hat, it horrifies me to see the new CEO be
described like that. He sounds like one of the worst people for Red Hat. I
admit I despise power seekers and people with tempers, so that's coloring my
view a lot.

I have always been optimistic about Red Hat's future, but this has me very
worried. Red Hat has done so much good in the world, and it would suck to see
them shrink or disappear. That said tho, I'd rather they go extinct than
become evil. The latter suddenly seems like a possibility. I sure hope I'm
wrong.

~~~
barkingcat
Yah similar to zapita's reply below, if this person is a driving force in
redhat's past, you probably won't see any changes if you liked what they were
doing in the past.

Brings to light an understanding of things like systemd though. I can
understand how a culture like this would promote systemd's "all or nothing"
approach.

The thing is, this is how Redhat Wins and has been winning ... I think redhat
won't disappear because of this leadership style, but this is how it has been
getting contracts, making money, getting sponsorships, and being attractive
enough to be bought by IBM.

~~~
zapita
> _The thing is, this is how Redhat Wins and has been winning ... I think
> redhat won 't disappear because of this leadership style, but this is how it
> has been getting contracts, making money, getting sponsorships, and being
> attractive enough to be bought by IBM._

Very true. Red Hat is a very successful company by any measure. Paul played an
important role in making that happen.

At the same time, Red Hat also has a major problem which limits its long-term
growth potential: lack of meaningful diversification. RHEL is still the lion's
share of their revenue. It's a powerhouse of a business, but its growth is
definitely reaching a plateau. So what comes next? As far as I can tell, the
answer is: Openshift and Ansible. Both are successful products, for different
reasons. But can they grow revenue fast enough to compensate for RHEL's
gradual decline? The answer seems to be "not yet". I think Red Hat reached the
same conclusion, realized that their stock price would likely peak in
2019/2020 as markets realize the problem, and decided to sell.

And here's the thing: Paul also owns this problem. The failure to
differentiate happened on his watch. If you believe Openshift/Ansible revenue
is already on the same growth trajectory as RHEL, then success is a matter of
execution, and Paul is the right guy for the job. But if you believe that
Ansible and Openshift, while good, are just not as game-changing as RHEL once
was - then no amount of execution will solve that problem.

EDIT: I meant "diversification", not differentiation! My bad.

~~~
oso2k
DISCLAIMER: I work for Red Hat Consulting.

Red Hat almost doesn't sell RHEL by itself anymore [0][1]. RHEL is lumped into
OpenShift, Quay, OCS, OpenStack, RHV and more often than not sold along side
Ansible, Tower, JBoss, AMQ, Fuse, DecisionManager, etc. So, the revenue
streams are being bundled together which makes it harder to tease out which
product is pushing the Total Revenue line. Our integration with IBM might make
that even harder to tell since they love to bundle everything into Cloud Paks
[2]. You can review our 10Qs to understand our Revenue performance.

What do you mean we lack differentiation? From who or what? Microsoft? AWS?
Google? Canonical? SuSe? Apple? VMware? Pivotal? Docker?

When we got acquired, we were the first $3B Open Source company with double-
digit percentage growth [3]. And I think there is a brawl going on for big
Corporate IT Cloud $$$. You might make the case that Red Hat was completely
outgunned in a scenario where a $3B company wanted to compete against $100B
companies (AWS, Google, MS, IBM).

[0] [https://www.redhat.com/en/store/linux-
platforms](https://www.redhat.com/en/store/linux-platforms)

[1] [https://www.redhat.com/en/store/red-hat-
middleware](https://www.redhat.com/en/store/red-hat-middleware)

[2] [https://www.ibm.com/cloud/paks/](https://www.ibm.com/cloud/paks/)

[3] [https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/red-hat-
repor...](https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/red-hat-reports-
first-quarter-results-fiscal-year-2020)

~~~
zapita
> _Red Hat almost doesn 't sell RHEL by itself anymore [0][1]. RHEL is lumped
> into OpenShift, Quay, OCS, OpenStack, RHV and more often than not sold along
> side Ansible, Tower, JBoss, AMQ, Fuse, DecisionManager, etc._

Right, but that only strengthens my point. Red Hat is bundling add-ons with
RHEL in an effort to boost add-on sales. Without the bundling, those products
would be doing considerably worse in the marketplace.

> _So, the revenue streams are being bundled together which makes it harder to
> tease out which product is pushing the Total Revenue line_

Again, this supports my point. Given the historical importance of RHEL revenue
standalone, there is no good reason to bundle it with other streams, other
than to hide something. What is being hidden, presumably, is exactly how much
Red Hat still depends on good old RHEL renewal, as opposed to genuine demand
for their new products.

~~~
oso2k
I wouldn't put so much credence on historical revenue streams. As computing
has changed, so have the revenue streams. There's fewer & fewer companies
these days building and selling OSes. Linux has done wonders to standardize
and commoditize the OS. I think the reality of computing today is that
platforms, subscriptions & services are what companies want. It's a very Cloud
Computing or Utilities-like conversation at certain levels of many companies.
SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, CaaS, KaaS, Managed Services (your PaaS, IaaS, CaaS, KaaS or
"X"aaS). We (Red Hat) have even developed (or are developing) Automation as a
Service, AppDev as a Service, Digital Transformation as a Service, (Data)
Integration as a Service managed services or service offerings. And obviously
for Red Hat, it is all on a foundation of RHEL. But to focus on the OS is
short sighted. No one believes an OS by itself is the solution anymore. So you
can call them add-ons to RHEL, but things like OpenShift, Ansible, OpenStack,
Satellite, etc. also have their add-ons in our catalog.

So, I don't believe we're intentionally trying to hide revenue deltas in one
product or another. I think that as computing has changed, customers are no
longer asking if an OS can run these 1, 2, 3, dozen apps or network services
on a single machine. Instead, they're asking for platforms or services that
run their 10K or 100K apps/services in elastic, scalable and manageable ways.
And we have platforms for those customers. And those platforms and service
generally try to optimize for density and utilization. So that frees up
resources for new apps and services.

~~~
zapita
I agree that the world is moving away from the OS-centric model, towards a
cloud-centric model. I just don’t think Red Hat is nearly as strong in the new
model as it was in the old.

Red Hat was an uncontested leader and innovator in the OS market. In the cloud
market... not the same story. The gap in revenue between RHEL and _everything
else_ illustrates that.

~~~
oso2k
I don't worry about that. We're backed by IBM Cloud now, there was that $34B
bet placed last year, there's all sort of cross selling going on between IBM
and Red Hat. I imagine we'll see more and more Red Hat software integrated in
IBM Cloud services and offerings, and then, we'll have a Red Hat Enterprise
Linux which will look a lot like Amazon Linux (which appears to be based on
RHEL & CentOS).

~~~
freedomben
Do you think IBM cloud will get more competitive price and feature wise? AWS
(and Google and Azure, etc) are overpriced in many ways (dgress charges
anyone?). I would love to see IBM cloud be price competitive. If it also then
featured first class Red Hat products that could be compelling even to startup
and hobbyists. I'd happily pay the same cost I pay now for a VM to get the
equivalent CPU/mem/disk in an OpenShift cluster.

------
fanatic2pope
Wow, for the first time in decades I see a sliver of hope for IBM's relevance.

~~~
mathattack
RedHat shares IBM’s model of “change the terms and product definitions every
year and audit folks to death who can’t switch providers”

They are going to irrelevance together.

~~~
linuxftw
I've worked with several large firms that had large footprints of Red Hat
products and never heard about them being audited. You're confusing them with
Oracle.

~~~
op00to
No, just sounds like that person can’t keep track of how many system they
deploy.

~~~
linuxftw
Well, it's not always as simple as 'how many systems' even when you're talking
about just an operating system. There's licensing based on cores and/or
sockets. Then there's licensing for virtual machines.

Oracle was really nasty in some of the licensing scenarios, IIRC. If you ran
an Oracle DB on an unlicensed platform in a VM (such as VMWare), then when you
got audited, you needed to pay for how many cores/sockets were in the physical
server, rather than just how much CPU your VM was using.

~~~
op00to
Is there evidence of Red Hat ever doing that kind of gotcha licensing?

~~~
linuxftw
I don't know of any, but that isn't to say there isn't any. Oracle on the
other hand is widely known for this practice.

------
brian_herman__
Hopefully this will be like when Apple bought Next.

~~~
syshum
I hope is not like when IBM bought the Weather Company then proceeded to
destroy all the good things Weather Underground did

~~~
abrowne
Did anyone from the Weather Company join IBM senior leadership?

~~~
aquaticsunset
David Kenny ran Watson for a couple years.

------
woodandsteel
Cringely on IBM, Red Hat, and Whitehurst:
[https://www.cringely.com/2020/01/31/predictions-
for-2020-ibm...](https://www.cringely.com/2020/01/31/predictions-for-2020-ibm-
and-trump/)

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texascloud
Is this good for IBM?

~~~
rwmj
In the sense that we hope Red Hat takes over IBM and makes it a success again,
yes.

