Red Hat Inc. opens the virtual doors of its annual Red Hat Summit this week amid a major leadership shift at both the open-source giant and its parent, IBM Corp.

Less than three weeks ago Arvind Krishna took over as chief executive of IBM, becoming the first engineer to hold the position in the company’s 106-year history. At the same time, Jim Whitehurst ascended to the role of IBM president and Paul Cormier (pictured at the 2018 summit) assumed the CEO spot at Red Hat.

Like Krishna, Cormier is the first engineer to lead his company. That’s appropriate, he said in an interview with SiliconANGLE. The technology landscape is becoming more complex and there’s more at stake when customers make decisions.

“There’s so much more fear, uncertainty and doubt out there that it takes more technically savvy people to wade through it,” he said. “It’s a much more complex sale now than it used to be.”

Red Hat’s product portfolio certainly has become more complex over the course of Cormier’s 19-year career at the company. When he joined in 2001, Red Hat was a small Linux software provider struggling to convince big companies of the merits of open source. By the time it was acquired by IBM last year, it was a $3.4 billion diversified software giant that commanded a $34 billion price tag.

Leading the shift

Observers attribute much of that growth to Cormier’s stewardship of Red Hat’s enterprise strategy. He has led many of the acquisitions that built out the company’s enterprise product line, and as president of products and technologies, he has been critical in defining its hybrid cloud strategy.

Red Hat may be a lot bigger than it was when he joined, but Cormier said it has never lost touch with its roots in open source, where “all the innovation has moved,” he said. The company has also had a knack for picking a long-term view and sticking with it.

Hybrid cloud is a technology epoch that Cormier believes will dominate the next decade of information technology evolution. “Every merger and acquisition we’ve looked at has been through that hybrid lens,” he said.

Although most often associated with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the company has successfully expanded to become a full-stack cloud infrastructure provider, anchored by the OpenStack cloud manager and OpenShift platform-as-a-service. With its technology now embedded into nearly every Fortune 500 company and public cloud provider, he said, “We’re literally helping our customers keep their businesses running at this point because of everything we’ve done to make our products enterprise-class.”

The middle of a pandemic has been a strange time to effect a major leadership change, but the die was cast in January, when former IBM CEO Ginni Rometty’s announced her retirement shortly before the coronavirus gripped the world’s attention. “I don’t think anybody expected Ginni to announce her transition this soon,” he said.

A virtual transition

Working from his summer home on Cape Cod in Massachusetts, Cormier has focused on rallying his troops through biweekly “all hands” meetings and a steady stream of videoconferences with senior staff and customers.

While many businesses are struggling to adapt to business declines and workforces scattered to living rooms and home offices around the world, Red Hat is taking disruption in stride because “this is how we’ve operated for 20 years,” Cormier said. “Probably 25% to 30% of our staff is remote.”

The salesforce “is keeping very much in sync with customers” and the product group he used to head is holding weekly “virtual office hours” staggered for customers in different regions of the world. “We’ve had a gazillion more hours of both virtual private networks and video and it’s just all worked because they’ve had a great test bed for all these years,” he told Stu Miniman, senior analyst of SiliconANGLE sister market research firm Wikibon, in a recent interview on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s video streaming platform (below).

Although the scenario may be strange, the business shutdowns triggered by the pandemic have also afforded an opportunity get some perspective on where the company is going. “We’re still hiring, but we’ll slow down a little during this period,” he said. “It will give us a chance to step back and get more integrated.”

Don’t expect radical change at Red Hat under the new CEO. Cormier acknowledges that he is “a little more direct” than his predecessor but “we get to the same place usually. We’ve been working together for 12 years and we’re still going to work together.”

As one of the architects of the hybrid cloud strategy, Cormier plans no changes in direction. However, he believes Red Hat can become more aligned around consistent execution and communication. “Instead of mentioning something to somebody at the coffee pot, you have to overtly plan that conversation,” he said.

One thing he will miss out on is the celebration that would have marked his ascension at a typical Red Hat Summit. The show will go on, but the agenda will be more sober and practical than usual. Many sessions have already been recorded.

“We didn’t think that celebration part this year was really appropriate considering where we were,” Cormier told Miniman. “We felt it was important to have our customers understand where we’re going in the coming year, some of the new products we have coming, and how we can help them.

Photo: Mark Albertson/SiliconANGLE