February 08, 2008

Red Hat's new CEO Jim Whitehurst looks to the future

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And what about your experience makes you well-suited to help meet those challenges and diversify Red Hat's products beyond Linux into more of a full open-source software provider?

For starters, I am an operator. I am pretty good at getting a company to focus, and focus on a few things. We certainly did that at Delta and did that well in the turnaround. Obviously, having come from a larger company and having run a larger company, I have a good sense of the processes and systems we need to make sure governance [and] processes work well.

About whether we need to diversify or not: People are asking, "Well, should we have bought [open-source database company] MySQL?" [Editor's note: Sun Microsystems said last month it is buying MySQL for about $1 billion.] We are still a very small-share player in the server OS market and a small-share player in middleware [with JBoss]. If you look at the quality of our technology, it's the best. We feel very good about that.

We still have basic execution to do to reach our full potential in the markets we're in. So I don't feel the need to diversify until we nail the product and are fully [satisfied] with our existing products. I'm not sure we want to divert our time and attention to other things.

A lot of people have been critical of Red Hat for what it’s done so far with JBoss, and think success with this is key to proving Red Hat can evolve beyond Linux. How are you going to make that business more successful?

Obviously execution and commercial execution will be big focuses going forward [for JBoss]. We fundamentally changed the JBoss business model from a big consulting/support [business] to our enterprise/.org models that we had with REL [on the enterprise side] and Fedora [on the .org side]. It has, without a doubt, proven to be a very successful model, and one could argue it's about the only demonstrated successful model of any size with open source.

In the same way we have Fedora and REL, we have the .org version of JBoss and the enterprise edition. JBoss had a different business model before, but we think our business model has proven the most successful and the most durable. It's the right decision. It just takes a while.

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