23.Tablet Connections

Where does Red Hat go from here? Here's what Matt Hicks, CEO, and Paul Cormier, the chairman, have to say. According to Hicks, "We'll continue to invest a lot in security. That was the foundation that Red Hat was built on. That you can get open-source innovation and deploy it with trust. Nothing has changed with that other than we certainly secure a lot more software today."

 

In its latest quarter, IBM saw its hybrid-cloud revenue jump 18% to $5.9 billion. Along with this, IBM saw its highest sales growth in a decade. Much of that is due to its stand-alone Red Hat division. True, Red Hat sales increased by "only" 12%, which is low by Red Hat standards but darn good by any other standard. So what will Red Hat do now that it has a new CEO, Matt Hicks, and chairman, Paul Cormier? 

The answer: Stay the course.

In an interview, Hicks, who's been with Red Hat since 2006, said, "[We'll keep using] the same core fundamentals that we built 20-plus years ago." Why? Because the combination of Linux, open-source software, and top support, "continues to play in new markets, whether that's the shift to cloud and cloud services or to edge computing. In the next couple of quarters. we'll just focus on executing. There's great momentum right now around the open hybrid cloud."