Enterprise open source leader Red Hat has named Matt Hicks as its president and chief executive officer. Hicks, who previously served as Red Hat’s executive vice president of products and technologies, succeeds Paul Cormier, who will serve as chairman of Red Hat.
Hicks joined the company in 2006 as a developer on the IT team. He quickly rose via leadership positions across the organization, helping Red Hat solidify itself as a big name in open hybrid cloud technology. Most notably, Hicks was a foundational member of the engineering team that developed Red Hat OpenShift which is used in hybrid cloud deployments across industries, now serving as the enterprise Kubernetes platform.
As executive vice president of products and technologies, Hicks was responsible for the entirety of Red Hat’s product strategy and engineering.
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“When I first joined Red Hat, I was passionate about open source and our mission, and I wanted to be a part of that,” said Hicks on announcement of his position as CEO. “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.”
With more than 25 years of experience in Linux and a background in computer engineering, Hicks is known for his work in solving the next generation of IT challenges with open source innovation. Speaking recently with ERP Today, Hicks remarked how adopting open source products doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing approach for enterprises.
“IT teams should look at how open source technologies can bolster or supplement existing deployments and, as needs change, slowly shift components of monolithic applications to open source counterparts when it makes sense.
“Disrupting a critical application is never the right path, but deliberately evolving into an open ERP foundation is absolutely a well-trodden and successful approach.”
Read the full interview with Hicks online on ERP Today.
