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Matt Hicks points out the new direction of Red Hat

Regardless of the circumstances that have brought Matt Hicks to the top of Red Hat, his presence is going to generate a lot of interest, as the red hat firm, now a subsidiary of IBM, is the leading corporation within the Linux spectrum. Taking advantage of the occasion, the veteran Steven Vaughan-Nichols has met with Hicks and Paul Cormier, his predecessor in charge, to ask them about the most immediate future of the company.

Regarding the direction of Red Hat, Hicks intends to maintain the line that has led the company to grow in the last 20 years and has said that they will try to join the “new markets, be it the shift to the cloud and cloud services or to edge computing. In the next two quarters we will only focus on executing. There’s a lot of momentum right now around open hybrid cloud”.

Red Hat, as a great company, not only develops its own things, but also collaborates with other large corporations. Here Hicks mentioned working with General Motors on the development of Ultifi, the auto giant’s end-to-end software platform. On the other hand, he recalled that two days ago a partnership was announced with the European technology company ABB, related to the automation of manufacturing.

Paul Cormier, meanwhile, will remain at Red Hat. He will lead the strategic advisory board and will be with the management team in an advisory role. The former CEO and former president has told Vaughan-Nichols: “I dare say we were the first software company to start beating the drum for hybrid cloud”. It seems that Cormier, in his new position, will be in a position that will also allow you to work more closely with customers and partners, particularly in helping them adopt hybrid cloud.

Regarding Cormier’s work while at the helm of Red Hat, Hicks assures that he has given the company “amazing structure and foundation with IBM and how we interact with IBM that I think will really be sustainable”. Here comes the relationship between parent company and subsidiary, from which Cormier understands that “red lines were red and blue lines were blue, and that will stay the same”. Hicks corroborates this: “It is critical, not only to Red Hat, but also to IBM, that we remain market neutral”. In these phrases, the defense of a certain autonomy by the subsidiary is perceived.

RedHat

As for the discontinuation of CentOS as a production system, Hicks has responded by pointing out that this was a necessary turnaround. Furthermore, in his opinion, the proper functioning of open source depends on the “contribution cycle, and that wasn’t happening with CentOS. A good part of the community continues to disagree with the company’s decision, but there are already several RHEL clones that are positioning themselves on the market, including AlmaLinux and Rocky.

Another aspect of great concern to Red Hat is security, an area in which the company will continue to invest heavily according to Matt Hicks, and not only in what we could define as “traditional servers”, but also in other areas such as the IoT, which is often the star of many of the scandals related to cybersecurity. Another aspect to take into account is the trickle of Specter-type vulnerabilities that affect x86 processors, even when these are impossible to solve.

Red Hat is a company that likes to look to the future, and edge computing is another area of ​​focus. Matt Hicks has commented here that by 2024 they expect a “800% growth in applications built for edge computing. We want those apps to be part of the open hybrid cloud. We believe we are uniquely positioned to reconnect end devices to the assets you have in your data centers and the cloud you use to run your business today.”.

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Everything exposed by Matt Hicks and Paul Cormier has been preceded by the results of the last quarter, in which IBM has registered the greatest increase in sales level in a decade, with its hybrid cloud division growing 18% to reach 5,900 millions of dollars. For its part, Red Hat sales have increased by 12%.

You can read the full interview on ZDNet.

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