Red Hat names Matt Hicks President and Chief Executive Officer

Red Hat, Inc., a provider of open source solutions, announced the appointment of Matt Hicks as president and CEO. Hicks, who previously served as Red Hat’s executive vice president of Products and Technologies, takes over for Paul Cormier, who will become Red Hat’s chairman.

Hicks, known within Red Hat as a hands-on leader, joined the company in 2006 as a developer on the IT team. He quickly rose through the ranks of the organization, assisting Red Hat in cementing its position as the open hybrid cloud technology leader. Hicks was a founding member of the engineering team that created Red Hat OpenShift.

“When I first joined Red Hat, I was passionate about open source and our mission, and I wanted to be a part of that. I am humbled and energized to be stepping into this role at this moment. There has never been a more exciting time to be in our industry and the opportunity in front of Red Hat is vast. I’m ready to roll up my sleeves and prove that open source technology truly can unlock the world’s potential,” said Matt Hicks, president and CEO, Red Hat.

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

Cormier, who was named president and CEO in 2020, has been with Red Hat for 21 years and has been instrumental in the company’s open hybrid cloud strategy, as well as the expansion of Red Hat’s portfolio to a full, modern IT stack based on open source innovation. His efforts to transition Red Hat Linux from a freely downloadable operating system to a subscription-based operating system with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) were a watershed moment.

Paul Cormier, chairman, Red Hat said: “Matt is the exemplification of a true Red Hatter and is absolutely the right person to step into this role. His experience across different parts of our business has given him depth and breadth of knowledge about how we can best work together to scale and remain the open hybrid cloud leader. He understands our product strategy and the direction the industry is moving in a way that’s second to none. As chairman, I’m excited to get to work with our customers, partners, and Matt in new ways. My focus moving forward will be on helping customers drive innovation forward with a hybrid cloud platform built on open source technology. Open source technology has won the innovation debates and whatever the future looks like, it’s going to be built on open source technology and Red Hat will be there.”