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Paul Cormier Replaces Jim Whitehurst as Red Hat CEO

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Re: Paul Cormier Replaces Jim Whitehurst as Red Hat CEO

#41

Post by zapita »

barkingcat wrote: post #37
BaronVonSteuben wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

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…

> 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.

Re: Paul Cormier Replaces Jim Whitehurst as Red Hat CEO

#42

Post by cachestash »

Longhanks wrote: post #19
zapita wrote: post #16

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 h…

Sounds like a unhealthy place to work at.

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.

Re: Paul Cormier Replaces Jim Whitehurst as Red Hat CEO

#43

Post by cachestash »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #35
zapita wrote: post #16

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 h…

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.

He was the reason for the company being so open source focused, he managed RH engineering for near on 20 years.

Re: Paul Cormier Replaces Jim Whitehurst as Red Hat CEO

#44

Post by rurp »

zapita wrote: post #16

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 h…

>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.

Re: Paul Cormier Replaces Jim Whitehurst as Red Hat CEO

#45

Post by op00to »

BaronVonSteuben wrote: post #31
Longhanks wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like a unhealthy place to work at.

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.

You decide your opinion on the leaders of your company based on unverified bogeyman stories on a message board? Oh boy.

Re: Paul Cormier Replaces Jim Whitehurst as Red Hat CEO

#46

Post by aquaticsunset »

cachestash wrote: post #43
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

He was the reason for the company being so open source focused, he managed RH engineering for near on 20 years.

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.

Re: Paul Cormier Replaces Jim Whitehurst as Red Hat CEO

#47

Post by aquaticsunset »

abrowne wrote: post #27
syshum wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope is not like when IBM bought the Weather Company then proceeded to destroy all the good things Weather Underground did

Did anyone from the Weather Company join IBM senior leadership?

David Kenny ran Watson for a couple years.

Re: Paul Cormier Replaces Jim Whitehurst as Red Hat CEO

#48

Post by oso2k »

zapita wrote: post #41
barkingcat wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 majo…

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...

Re: Paul Cormier Replaces Jim Whitehurst as Red Hat CEO

#49

Post by zapita »

oso2k wrote: post #48
zapita wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 majo…

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…

My bad! I meant to say "lack of diversification", as in: too much revenue coming from a single 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.

Re: Paul Cormier Replaces Jim Whitehurst as Red Hat CEO

#50

Post by stuff4ben »

linuxftw wrote: post #14
mathattack wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.
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