Jim Whitehurst, the newly appointed Red Hat CEO, is aiming to get Red Hat's revenue in the next three years to more than $1 billion.

Jim Whitehurst replaced Matt Szulik, who left the CEO position after nine years because of family health reasons on January 1st, this year. Matt Szulik is now the chairman of Red Hat's board of directors. Whitehurst swapped his COO position at Delta Airlines with the much more promising one at Red Hat.

The CEO wants to move beyond the operating system and is looking at delivering around SOA and middleware. He considers that this is an area where Red Hat's execution can improve. Whitehurst wants to make JBoss grow at twice the rate of Red Hat Linux Enterprise. The company might rely less on the already successful RHEL product and concentrate on middleware, which will work with virtualization to offer services and applications from independent software vendors in portable packages.

Raven Zachary, an analyst with the 451 Group, said about Jim Whitehurst: "He's an operator. It's tough to run an airline. Even though there have been lots of critiques of the airlines, the reality is that he understands complex issues related to operations."

Red Hat is trying to combine its operating system, virtualization, middleware, ISV application and software delivered as services into an enterprise data center platform. Whitehurst doesn't feel intimidated by Microsoft, and considers that their open source, higher-value products are very competitive with Microsoft's ones.

Jim Whitehurst, in an interview for Network World, said: "This is a company that still has a lot to do in developing the processes and the systems and the governance structures to continue to scale and be effective. So I will be spending a fair amount of time making sure that we are developing the models of decision making and all of this basic infrastructure kind of stuff to ensure we are enabling the business and not hindering it."