Red Hat appoints Matt Hicks as president & CEO

Matt Hicks has been named as its new president and CEO.

Hicks previously served as products and technologies executive vice president and succeeds Paul Cormier, who will serve as chairman of the company.

Known as a hands-on leader within Red Hat, Hicks joined the company in 2006 as a developer on the IT team.

He quickly rose via leadership positions across the organisation, helping Red Hat solidify itself as the open hybrid cloud technology leader.

Most notably, Hicks was a foundational member of the engineering team that developed Red Hat OpenShift, which has grown into the backbone for hybrid cloud deployments across industries, now serving as the industry's leading enterprise Kubernetes platform.

He has remained at the vanguard of hybrid cloud computing and Red Hat's product strategy since then.

As executive vice president of Products and Technologies, Hicks was responsible for the entirety of Red Hat's product strategy and engineering.

"When I first joined Red Hat, I was passionate about open source and our mission, and I wanted to be a part of that," Hicks says.

"I'm ready to roll up my sleeves and prove that open source technology truly can unlock the world's potential."

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.

"Matt is the exemplification of a true Red Hatter and is absolutely the right person to step into this role," Cormier says.

"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."