Red Hat has named Paul Cormier as president and chief executive officer of the company, effective today. Cormier succeeds Jim Whitehurst who takes up his due role as IBM president.

• Having joined Red Hat in 2001, Cormier is credited with pioneering the subscription model that transformed Red Hat from an open source disruptor to an enterprise technology mainstay, moving Red Hat Linux from a freely downloadable operating system to Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
• Cormier has driven more than 25 acquisitions at Red Hat, moving the company well beyond its Linux roots and helped create a full, modern IT stack based on open source innovation that disrupted the IT industry.
• For more than a decade, Cormier has championed a vision for open hybrid cloud, giving customers the flexibility to deliver any app, anywhere on any infrastructure from the edge and bare metal to multiple public clouds in a common, consistent manner.
• That vision helped establish Red Hat OpenShift, the enterprise Kubernetes platform, as a backbone of hybrid cloud deployments across industries.
• Cormier has also forged industry-changing partnerships, including a landmark partnership with Microsoft to bring broader choice to hybrid cloud deployments.
• He has been instrumental in Red Hat’s structural combination with IBM, focused on scaling and accelerating Red Hat while maintaining its independence and neutrality.

In addition to his new role as president of IBM, Whitehurst becomes chairman of Red Hat, succeeding Arvind Krishna, who is now CEO of IBM.