On August 27 Red Hat disclosed that Brian Stevens, the company CTO, has resigned after over 12 years of service, an unexpected news that drew open-source community attention on the the next future of the Raleigh company.
In his career in Red Hat, Brian Stevens has been in charge as Corporate CTO while maintaining a strong engineering involvement into Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Red Hat has been extremely telegraphic, announcing the step down of Stevens as CTO in the company and that Paul Cormier, President of products and technologies at Red Hat, is going to take over as CTO until a substitute is found.
The news catches everyone unprepared but we can argue that is the result of the changes that Red Hat is planning in its go to market strategy, a process that partially began with the hiring of the former Gartner analyst, Alessandro Perilli as General Manager of the Open Hybrid Cloud program.
We wonder if Red Hat will see this as an opportunity to re-invent its CTO office, following a trend adopted from several other vendors (with easily demonstrable benefits we can say), having, for example, several CTOs, each one focused on a core business line (or region), instead of a single global CTO.
In the announcement Jim Whitehurst, President and CEO of Red Hat, writes few words of thanksgiving to his former colleague Stevens:
We want to thank Brian for his years of service and numerous contributions to Red Hat’s business. We wish him well in his future endeavors.