14 DAY TRIAL // Red Hat Incorporated, the Linux business solution provider, has just named its new CEO, after ex-head Matthew Szulik left his position at the company. The ex-Chief Executive Officer put an end to nine years of career at Red Hat in an executive position, but "retired" as Chairman of the company's board of directors.
The move was not a surprise for the open-source community. There was a new CEO ready to take the company, in the person of Jim Whitehurst, former chief operating officer of Delta Air Lines. Whitehurst will assume the roles of CEO and President starting the first day of the next year.
According to a Red Hat employee, the new CEO has solid technical credentials. "I have not met him, but he runs Fedora Core 6 and Fedora 7 on two of his machines, and Slackware on a third, so that's a good first impression," Max Spevack's blog on the Red Hat site reads.
Matthew Szulik has completely agreed upon the board of directors' decision of naming Whitehurst as the new CEO. He announced that his decision was based on "personal reasons". He also recalled on his company blog the times when his office was situated across the hall to an automated pop machine, whose noises reminded callers of wild fights.
Szulik used to fuel the business partners' suppositions that indeed fights were going on and that was "how people at Red Hat settled technical issues like software bugs and features in new releases."
The former Red Hat CEO considers that it was the fighting spirit to attract major investors such as Dell, HP, and IBM, and pleasantly recalls the important events that took place when he was the company's CEO.
As for Whitehurst, before arriving at Delta Air Lines, he was a VP at The Boston Consulting Group. The new Red Hat CEO is a graduate of Rice University and Harvard Business School.