Live data from Hacker News

Paul Cormier Replaces Jim Whitehurst as Red Hat CEO

itprotoday.com

61–70 of 79 posts

Re: Paul Cormier Replaces Jim Whitehurst as Red Hat CEO

#61
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, just sounds like that person can’t keep track of how many system they deploy.

Well, it's not always as simple as 'how many systems' even when you're talking about just an operating system. There's licensing based on cores and/or sockets. Then there's licensing for virtual machines.

Oracle was really nasty in some of the licensing scenarios, IIRC. If you ran an Oracle DB on an unlicensed platform in a VM (such as VMWare), then when you got audited, you needed to pay for how many cores/sockets were in the physical server, rather than just how much CPU your VM was using.

Re: Paul Cormier Replaces Jim Whitehurst as Red Hat CEO

#62
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is that? I can’t imagine it going well for an extended period of time.

> I can’t imagine it going well for an extended period of time. Why is that? I don't think there are many modern examples, but the idea of consensus based decision making isn't new, and doesn't appear to be intrinsically flawed. Consider the origin of the word triumvirate. While the first one ended less than optimally for all concerned, we have a slightly less violent way of dealing with organisational promotion and…

The Swiss Federal Council is an example.

Re: Paul Cormier Replaces Jim Whitehurst as Red Hat CEO

#63
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Its the co-CEO strategy, or two in box. Its becoming quite popular as of late.

It doesn't have to be a strict two in the box situation. I am the President of my company and I brought on a CEO. I have neither the inclination nor the skillset to take on CEO-related tasks, but I head up corporate strategy and other tasks. We both have circles of unilateral action, and we have some areas where we overlap.

At the end of the day I hold a plurality (and currently a majority) of shares and I'm the sole founder, but unfit to be the CEO, at least in my opinion. It's another form of delegation.

Re: Paul Cormier Replaces Jim Whitehurst as Red Hat CEO

#64
post #54
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Like what?

Like what I wrote in my original comment:

> 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”)

Re: Paul Cormier Replaces Jim Whitehurst as Red Hat CEO

#65
post #28
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…

> 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.

Red Hat has been running this way for years.

Re: Paul Cormier Replaces Jim Whitehurst as Red Hat CEO

#66

Even more interesting > "Red Hat's CEO for the past 12 years moves to take on the role of IBM president"

What exactly is happening when the lead of a smaller acquired company ends up running the acquiring company? Surely there must be a lot of pre-acquisition people near the top who are salty about losing their chance?

Re: Paul Cormier Replaces Jim Whitehurst as Red Hat CEO

#67
post #52
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. Right, but that only strengthens my point. Red Hat is bundling add-ons with RHEL in an effort to boost add-on sales. Without the bundling, those products would be doing considerably worse in the marketplace…

I wouldn't put so much credence on historical revenue streams. As computing has changed, so have the revenue streams. There's fewer & fewer companies these days building and selling OSes. Linux has done wonders to standardize and commoditize the OS. I think the reality of computing today is that platforms, subscriptions & services are what companies want. It's a very Cloud Computing or Utilities-like conversation at certain levels of many companies. SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, CaaS, KaaS, Managed Services (your PaaS, IaaS, CaaS, KaaS or "X"aaS). We (Red Hat) have even developed (or are developing) Automation as a Service, AppDev as a Service, Digital Transformation as a Service, (Data) Integration as a Service managed services or service offerings. And obviously for Red Hat, it is all on a foundation of RHEL. But to focus on the OS is short sighted. No one believes an OS by itself is the solution anymore. So you can call them add-ons to RHEL, but things like OpenShift, Ansible, OpenStack, Satellite, etc. also have their add-ons in our catalog.

So, I don't believe we're intentionally trying to hide revenue deltas in one product or another. I think that as computing has changed, customers are no longer asking if an OS can run these 1, 2, 3, dozen apps or network services on a single machine. Instead, they're asking for platforms or services that run their 10K or 100K apps/services in elastic, scalable and manageable ways. And we have platforms for those customers. And those platforms and service generally try to optimize for density and utilization. So that frees up resources for new apps and services.

Re: Paul Cormier Replaces Jim Whitehurst as Red Hat CEO

#68
post #64
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like what?

Like what I wrote in my original comment: > 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”)

From someone coming from support, This is horseshit.
Post reply on HN