Cloud News
Red Hat Chairman Paul Cormier: ‘Even A Direct Account Will Be With Partners’
Wade Tyler Millward
‘We pared down by two-thirds the number of accounts we’re going to call on directly—and even a direct account will be with partners. But everything else will be even directly serviced by our partners,’ says Red Hat Chairman Paul Cormier.
What are some of your immediate goals as chairman?
Lots of chairman roles are ceremonial. … [But] I’m going to continue to have an office here. My plan is to be here.
We saw the move to hybrid before, I’ll say, pretty much anyone. Because it’s been a Linux, open-source world in the cloud space. And so that’s what we do.
In the beginning of cloud, we had so many CIOs we work with say, ‘Only 1,000 of my applications are going to one cloud next week.’
And it didn’t work out very well for most of them unless they got into it and realized what was involved … that’s now, solidly, it’s going to be a hybrid world. We’ve been building on that for eight or nine years.
One of the things I also focused on when I took over as CEO is, we wanted a three-year living strategy that we not only documented and put out there, but we ran the business by, that we executed to.
We’ve done that. We have that. It’s all around hybrid, multi-cloud, including all the way out to the edge.
So I’m going to help a lot of our customers make that a reality for them. I’m going to work closely with a lot of our customers. We have a strategic advisory board, for example, I’m going to run the strategic advisory board.
I’m going to work with the management team on various projects, both internally and externally as well. So I intend to bring together our strategy with the market. It’s a perfect time for that because I think hybrid is now getting to be fairly well understood and the norm, more so than even over the last couple of years.
So those are the areas I’m going to focus on, bringing that strategy to life, working with the management team, working with our customers, and continuing to work with a lot of the partners that I’ve known for some 20 or 30 years.
