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IBM’s Red Hat taps product and technology chief as new leader

Matt Hicks takes over as the software unit’s chief executive officer and president from Paul Cormier, who will serve as chairman

by Bloomberg

July 13, 2022

IBM’s Red Hat named Matt Hicks, head of products and technologies, as its new leader, solidifying a bet that hybrid-cloud offerings will fuel the company’s growth.

Hicks takes over as the software unit’s chief executive officer and president from Paul Cormier, who will serve as chairman. “Paul and I have planned this for a while,” Hicks said Tuesday in an interview. “There’ll be a lot of similarities in what I did yesterday and what I’ll be doing tomorrow.”

International Business Machine (IBM) acquired Red Hat for about $34bn in 2019 as a central component of chief executive Arvind Krishna’s plan to steer the century-old company into the fast-growing cloud-computing market. As a division, Red Hat’s has seen steady revenue growth near 20 per cent, far outpacing IBM as a whole.

I joined @RedHat in 2006 as a developer, and I've held many job titles over the past 16 years. As I’ve prepared to step into the CEO role, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about my career at Red Hat and the opportunity I see that lies ahead: https://t.co/ykG5lPgA6R. pic.twitter.com/7IONOZdxtI

— Matt Hicks (@matthicksj) July 12, 2022

IBM hopes to distinguish itself in the crowded cloud market by targeting a hybrid model, which helps clients store and analyse information across their own data centres, private cloud services and servers run by major public providers such as Amazon.com and Microsoft. IBM has been a rare pocket of stability in the recent stock market meltdown. The shares have gained 4.1 per cent this year, closing at $139.18 Tuesday in New York, compared with a 28 per cent decline for the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100.

“Together, we can really lead a a new era of hybrid computing,” said Hicks, who joined Red Hat in 2006. “Red Hat has the technology expertise and open source model – IBM has the reach.”

Hicks said demand for hybrid cloud and software services should remain strong despite questions about the global economic outlook, touting recent deals with General Motors and ABB. The telecommunication and automotive industries are two areas he is targeting for expansion because they require geographically distributed data.

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