[HN Gopher] Paul Cormier Replaces Jim Whitehurst as Red Hat CEO
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Paul Cormier Replaces Jim Whitehurst as Red Hat CEO
Author : ldng
Score : 87 points
Date : 2020-04-09 17:33 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.itprotoday.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.itprotoday.com)
| fanatic2pope wrote:
| Wow, for the first time in decades I see a sliver of hope for
| IBM's relevance.
| mathattack wrote:
| RedHat shares IBM's model of "change the terms and product
| definitions every year and audit folks to death who can't
| switch providers"
|
| They are going to irrelevance together.
| linuxftw wrote:
| I've worked with several large firms that had large
| footprints of Red Hat products and never heard about them
| being audited. You're confusing them with Oracle.
| stuff4ben wrote:
| I worked for Cisco who were big RH users (RHEL, OpenStack,
| OpenShift, Quay, etc). We were audited and it basically
| comes up when contracts are renewed. It's not a bad thing,
| you just need to be honest about what you're using and how
| much and then just pay the man. Or don't and switch to
| other offerings. One thing I liked about RH is that they
| worked with you vs Oracle which was pure evil when it came
| being audited.
| acruns wrote:
| lol!
| zapita wrote:
| Good for Paul. He has wanted the CEO job forever, and was
| notoriously bitter about being passed over last time.
|
| Don't expect a revolution in Red Hat's strategy or culture. Paul
| was already extremely influential, especially on product and R&D
| which are not Jim's strong suits.
|
| Things to know about Paul:
|
| - He is very competitive and has a zero-sum approach to
| competition: for him to win, someone else has to lose.
|
| - He has a bad temper. If you work on the same floor as him, you
| will hear yelling.
|
| - He doesn't shy away from Oracle-style tactics. Expect customer
| audits to get more hardball; more aggressive use of anti-
| competitive bundling ("if you use this competitor's product on
| RHEL, we will not support that RHEL host").
| BaronVonSteuben wrote:
| As someone who is a big fan of Red Hat, it horrifies me to see
| the new CEO be described like that. He sounds like one of the
| worst people for Red Hat. I admit I despise power seekers and
| people with tempers, so that's coloring my view a lot.
|
| I have always been optimistic about Red Hat's future, but this
| has me very worried. Red Hat has done so much good in the
| world, and it would suck to see them shrink or disappear. That
| said tho, I'd rather they go extinct than become evil. The
| latter suddenly seems like a possibility. I sure hope I'm
| wrong.
| zapita wrote:
| A counter-point is that, if you like Red Hat today, you will
| probably still like Red Hat in 5 years, because the new CEO
| played a key role in getting Red Hat to this point.
| barkingcat wrote:
| Yah similar to zapita's reply below, if this person is a
| driving force in redhat's past, you probably won't see any
| changes if you liked what they were doing in the past.
|
| Brings to light an understanding of things like systemd
| though. I can understand how a culture like this would
| promote systemd's "all or nothing" approach.
|
| The thing is, this is how Redhat Wins and has been winning
| ... I think redhat won't disappear because of this leadership
| style, but this is how it has been getting contracts, making
| money, getting sponsorships, and being attractive enough to
| be bought by IBM.
| zapita wrote:
| > _The thing is, this is how Redhat Wins and has been
| winning ... I think redhat won 't disappear because of this
| leadership style, but this is how it has been getting
| contracts, making money, getting sponsorships, and being
| attractive enough to be bought by IBM._
|
| Very true. Red Hat is a very successful company by any
| measure. Paul played an important role in making that
| happen.
|
| At the same time, Red Hat also has a major problem which
| limits its long-term growth potential: lack of meaningful
| diversification. RHEL is still the lion's share of their
| revenue. It's a powerhouse of a business, but its growth is
| definitely reaching a plateau. So what comes next? As far
| as I can tell, the answer is: Openshift and Ansible. Both
| are successful products, for different reasons. But can
| they grow revenue fast enough to compensate for RHEL's
| gradual decline? The answer seems to be "not yet". I think
| Red Hat reached the same conclusion, realized that their
| stock price would likely peak in 2019/2020 as markets
| realize the problem, and decided to sell.
|
| And here's the thing: Paul also owns this problem. The
| failure to differentiate happened on his watch. If you
| believe Openshift/Ansible revenue is already on the same
| growth trajectory as RHEL, then success is a matter of
| execution, and Paul is the right guy for the job. But if
| you believe that Ansible and Openshift, while good, are
| just not as game-changing as RHEL once was - then no amount
| of execution will solve that problem.
|
| EDIT: I meant "diversification", not differentiation! My
| bad.
| oso2k wrote:
| DISCLAIMER: I work for Red Hat Consulting.
|
| Red Hat almost doesn't sell RHEL by itself anymore
| [0][1]. RHEL is lumped into OpenShift, Quay, OCS,
| OpenStack, RHV and more often than not sold along side
| Ansible, Tower, JBoss, AMQ, Fuse, DecisionManager, etc.
| So, the revenue streams are being bundled together which
| makes it harder to tease out which product is pushing the
| Total Revenue line. Our integration with IBM might make
| that even harder to tell since they love to bundle
| everything into Cloud Paks [2]. You can review our 10Qs
| to understand our Revenue performance.
|
| What do you mean we lack differentiation? From who or
| what? Microsoft? AWS? Google? Canonical? SuSe? Apple?
| VMware? Pivotal? Docker?
|
| When we got acquired, we were the first $3B Open Source
| company with double-digit percentage growth [3]. And I
| think there is a brawl going on for big Corporate IT
| Cloud $$$. You might make the case that Red Hat was
| completely outgunned in a scenario where a $3B company
| wanted to compete against $100B companies (AWS, Google,
| MS, IBM).
|
| [0] https://www.redhat.com/en/store/linux-platforms
|
| [1] https://www.redhat.com/en/store/red-hat-middleware
|
| [2] https://www.ibm.com/cloud/paks/
|
| [3] https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/red-
| hat-repor...
| zapita wrote:
| My bad! I meant to say "lack of diversification", as in:
| too much revenue coming from the flagship product.
|
| I did not mean to say there was a lack of differentiation
| - that is a much more subjective and controversial topic.
|
| What I'm talking about is much more straightforward: most
| of the money comes from RHEL. RHEL is not growing as fast
| as it used to. And other sources of revenue, like
| Openshift and Ansible, are not growing fast enough to
| fill the gap.
| [deleted]
| notacoward wrote:
| When I joined Red Hat, I was pretty surprised to find such an
| "old school DEC" hardball player in charge of engineering.
| That's what Paul is, but he's not evil. He's effective, and
| at the most important level he does represent the values we
| associate with Red Hat (which he helped shape after all). I'd
| be far more worried if they'd brought in somebody from
| outside, or from another part of IBM.
| rurp wrote:
| >Good for Paul
|
| Followed by:
|
| >zero-sum approach to competition
|
| >bad temper
|
| >Oracle-style tactics
|
| Sounds like what's good for Paul is going to be bad for a lot
| of employees and customers.
| CrankyBear wrote:
| Paul's very good at what he does, but no one who knows him
| would say he's easy to work with.
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| And this is supposed to be a good thing for the company that
| supposedly has open source and collaboration at its core?
|
| Sounds like he'd be better suited to the IBM CEO role.
| cachestash wrote:
| He was the reason for the company being so open source
| focused, he managed RH engineering for near on 20 years.
| aquaticsunset wrote:
| He famously likes to emphasize the "enterprise" aspect of
| Red Hat's product offerings. Red Hat is not an open source
| company - it's an enterprise software company through open
| source development. It's a really big difference.
| Longhanks wrote:
| Sounds like a unhealthy place to work at.
| BaronVonSteuben wrote:
| Indeed, that is my thought as well. If I worked there I'd
| want to stay as far away from this guy as possible. Red Hat
| seems like a pretty big company tho, so probably the average
| person never interacts with the CEO. But still, the tone gets
| set at the top, and will filter down.
| op00to wrote:
| You decide your opinion on the leaders of your company
| based on unverified bogeyman stories on a message board? Oh
| boy.
| cachestash wrote:
| Big over reaction and this is making him sound far worse than
| he is. Its more passion than rage with Paul as Red Hat is
| everything to him an he believes in the company 100%. There
| is also a lot more to Red Hat for its leadership. Jim is
| still up a level and then you have Chris Wright the CTO, a
| genuinely soft spoken sweet man.
| rwmj wrote:
| As an actual Red Hat employee (also someone who has seen Paul
| C both at a distance and close up for over a decade), it's a
| healthy and happy workplace. Also Paul has been effectively
| doing day to day running of Red Hat as long as I've been
| here, so I don't expect that much to change.
| zapita wrote:
| Like most large companies, it depends on your team and
| assignment.
| cachestash wrote:
| Agree with this, he is no wall flower. Its harder to meet
| someone more passionate about Red Hat than Paul.
| dralley wrote:
| There is certainly different flavors of "passion", and I'd
| personally prefer a different one. Oh well.
| _jal wrote:
| > He doesn't shy away from Oracle-style tactics
|
| And that will be the end of RH products in my shop. Fuck that
| noise, if you treat your customers like adversaries, I won't be
| one of them.
| notacoward wrote:
| Oh, he's not going to like the phrase "Oracle-style" at all.
| Another thing people should know about Paul Cormier is that his
| hatred for Oracle knows no bounds. There's certainly no love
| lost between the two companies at any level, but even in that
| context the depth of his loathing for them seemed notable. Some
| might say excessive. I was there for eight years BTW.
| zapita wrote:
| That is true - the hatred of Oracle runs deep. But when it
| comes to competitive tactics, they have more in common than
| the Red Hat marketing brochure would have you believe.
| MelioRatio wrote:
| If anyone wants to find out more on what Cormier wants to focus
| on over the coming years, he did a small QnA:
| https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/get-know-red-hat-president-an...
|
| It will be interesting to see, how his management style is going
| to impact Red Hat over the coming years. Considering his
| background and acumen, I feel like there is going to be a
| stronger focus on tailored services and specific solutions for
| organizations. They are already very active in the health care
| and financial industry, so this could be an area they might
| expand.
| stuff4ben wrote:
| A lot of IBM products are in the cloud and the focus from
| Whitehurst as IBM president is that cloud,
| containers/K8s/RHOSP, and edge are the big things that will be
| going on. It will be very interesting to see how RH plays into
| the broader IBM strategy. Will RH become the platform and IBM
| becomes tooling, services, and products on top of that
| platform? Or will RH move to more consultancy and enterprise IT
| services? Coming from Cisco where the acquired company always
| gets folded into the mothership, I find it very interesting to
| see IBM's stance of keeping RH alone and mostly separate. At
| least for now...
| cachestash wrote:
| its very possible and widely touted that it could go the
| other way, in that Red Hat takes over IBM (culturally. Red
| Hat certainly has a strong enough culture to do that.
| texascloud wrote:
| Is this good for IBM?
| rwmj wrote:
| In the sense that we hope Red Hat takes over IBM and makes it a
| success again, yes.
| brian_herman__ wrote:
| Hopefully this will be like when Apple bought Next.
| person_of_color wrote:
| Or Greece's reverse invasion of Rome!
| syshum wrote:
| I hope is not like when IBM bought the Weather Company then
| proceeded to destroy all the good things Weather Underground
| did
| abrowne wrote:
| Did anyone from the Weather Company join IBM senior
| leadership?
| aquaticsunset wrote:
| David Kenny ran Watson for a couple years.
| williamstein wrote:
| Even more interesting
|
| > "Red Hat's CEO for the past 12 years moves to take on the role
| of IBM president"
| dang wrote:
| Has the article buried the lede? Should we make this the title
| above?
| CameronNemo wrote:
| Whitehurst becoming IBM president is sort of old news, but I
| cannot find a discussion on HN about it. (only a few posts
| without discussion).
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22205335
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22198016
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22200653
|
| There was discussion about the matter on the post about
| Arvind Krishna becoming IBM CEO, but it was somewhat buried:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22196489
| abrowne wrote:
| Here's IBM release about that:
| https://newsroom.ibm.com/2020-01-30-Arvind-Krishna-Elected-I...
|
| President seems like second-in-command, below CEO. (And the
| outgoing CEO was both.) Am I understanding that right?
| cpetty wrote:
| Correct -- Ginni Rometty was CEO, President, and Chairman of
| the Board. She remains Chairman, while Arvind Krishna is now
| CEO and Whitehurst is President.
|
| This is the first time in a while that the IBM President &
| CEO roles have been divided among two different people.
| lowdose wrote:
| The president title was a thing for people claiming the top
| spot without being the founder. It doesn't make sense to
| split CEO & President role between two people, but when the
| fable is told long enough the people who tell believe it
| themselves.
| cachestash wrote:
| Its the co-CEO strategy, or two in box. Its becoming
| quite popular as of late.
| stingraycharles wrote:
| Why is that? I can't imagine it going well for an
| extended period of time.
| lowdose wrote:
| It's a safety scapegoat, just throw the president under
| the bus.
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