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As someone who is a big fan of Red Hat, it horrifies me to see the new CEO be described like that. He sounds like one of the worst people for Red Hat. I admit

As someone who is a big fan of Red Hat, it horrifies me to see the new CEO be described like that. He sounds like one of the worst people for Red Hat. I admit I despise power seekers and people with tempers, so that's coloring my view a lot. I have always been optimistic about Red Hat's future, but this has me very worried. Red Hat has done so much good in the world, and it would suck to see them shrink or disappear. That said tho, I'd rather they go extinct than become evil. The latter suddenly seems like a possibility. I sure hope I'm wrong.

zapita 7y ago
A counter-point is that, if you like Red Hat today, you will probably still like Red Hat in 5 years, because the new CEO played a key role in getting Red Hat to this point.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
barkingcat 7y ago
Yah similar to zapita's reply below, if this person is a driving force in redhat's past, you probably won't see any changes if you liked what they were doing in the past. Brings to light an understanding of things like systemd though. I can understand how a culture like this would promote systemd's "all or nothing" approach. The thing is, this is how Redhat Wins and has been winning ... I think redhat won't disappear because of this leadership style, but this is how it has been getting contracts, making money, getting sponsorships, and being attractive enough to be bought by IBM.
- zapita 7y ago
  > The thing is, this is how Redhat Wins and has been winning ... I think redhat won't disappear because of this leadership style, but this is how it has been getting contracts, making money, getting sponsorships, and being attractive enough to be bought by IBM. Very true. Red Hat is a very successful company by any measure. Paul played an important role in making that happen. At the same time, Red Hat also has a major problem which limits its long-term growth potential: lack of meaningful diversification. RHEL is still the lion's share of their revenue. It's a powerhouse of a business, but its growth is definitely reaching a plateau. So what comes next? As far as I can tell, the answer is: Openshift and Ansible. Both are successful products, for different reasons. But can they grow revenue fast enough to compensate for RHEL's gradual decline? The answer seems to be "not yet". I think Red Hat reached the same conclusion, realized that their stock price would likely peak in 2019/2020 as markets realize the problem, and decided to sell. And here's the thing: Paul also owns this problem. The failure to differentiate happened on his watch. If you believe Openshift/Ansible revenue is already on the same growth trajectory as RHEL, then success is a matter of execution, and Paul is the right guy for the job. But if you believe that Ansible and Openshift, while good, are just not as game-changing as RHEL once was - then no amount of execution will solve that problem. EDIT: I meant "diversification", not differentiation! My bad.
  - oso2k 7y ago
    DISCLAIMER: I work for Red Hat Consulting. Red Hat almost doesn't sell RHEL by itself anymore [0][1]. RHEL is lumped into OpenShift, Quay, OCS, OpenStack, RHV and more often than not sold along side Ansible, Tower, JBoss, AMQ, Fuse, DecisionManager, etc. So, the revenue streams are being bundled together which makes it harder to tease out which product is pushing the Total Revenue line. Our integration with IBM might make that even harder to tell since they love to bundle everything into Cloud Paks [2]. You can review our 10Qs to understand our Revenue performance. What do you mean we lack differentiation? From who or what? Microsoft? AWS? Google? Canonical? SuSe? Apple? VMware? Pivotal? Docker? When we got acquired, we were the first $3B Open Source company with double-digit percentage growth [3]. And I think there is a brawl going on for big Corporate IT Cloud $$$. You might make the case that Red Hat was completely outgunned in a scenario where a $3B company wanted to compete against $100B companies (AWS, Google, MS, IBM). [0] https://www.redhat.com/en/store/linux-platforms https://www.redhat.com/en/store/linux-platforms [1] https://www.redhat.com/en/store/red-hat-middleware https://www.redhat.com/en/store/red-hat-middleware [2] https://www.ibm.com/cloud/paks/ https://www.ibm.com/cloud/paks/ [3] https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/red-hat-reports-first-quarter-results-fiscal-year-2020 https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/red-hat-repor...
    - zapita 7y ago
      My bad! I meant to say "lack of diversification", as in: too much revenue coming from a single product. I did not mean to say there was a lack of differentiation - that is a much more subjective and controversial topic. What I'm talking about is much more straightforward: most of the money comes from RHEL. RHEL is not growing as fast as it used to. And other sources of revenue, like Openshift and Ansible, are not growing fast enough to fill the gap.
    - zapita 7y ago
      > Red Hat almost doesn't sell RHEL by itself anymore [0][1]. RHEL is lumped into OpenShift, Quay, OCS, OpenStack, RHV and more often than not sold along side Ansible, Tower, JBoss, AMQ, Fuse, DecisionManager, etc. Right, but that only strengthens my point. Red Hat is bundling add-ons with RHEL in an effort to boost add-on sales. Without the bundling, those products would be doing considerably worse in the marketplace. > So, the revenue streams are being bundled together which makes it harder to tease out which product is pushing the Total Revenue line Again, this supports my point. Given the historical importance of RHEL revenue standalone, there is no good reason to bundle it with other streams, other than to hide something. What is being hidden, presumably, is exactly how much Red Hat still depends on good old RHEL renewal, as opposed to genuine demand for their new products.
notacoward 7y ago
When I joined Red Hat, I was pretty surprised to find such an "old school DEC" hardball player in charge of engineering. That's what Paul is, but he's not evil. He's effective, and at the most important level he does represent the values we associate with Red Hat (which he helped shape after all). I'd be far more worried if they'd brought in somebody from outside, or from another part of IBM.
rvp-x 7y ago
I wouldn't expect significant changes in RedHat just because Paul Cormier got moved up one rank. He isn't new to the company, and had a lot of influence in his previous role.

zapita 7y ago

A counter-point is that, if you like Red Hat today, you will probably still like Red Hat in 5 years, because the new CEO played a key role in getting Red Hat to this point.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

barkingcat 7y ago

Yah similar to zapita's reply below, if this person is a driving force in redhat's past, you probably won't see any changes if you liked what they were doing in the past. Brings to light an understanding of things like systemd though. I can understand how a culture like this would promote systemd's "all or nothing" approach. The thing is, this is how Redhat Wins and has been winning ... I think redhat won't disappear because of this leadership style, but this is how it has been getting contracts, making money, getting sponsorships, and being attractive enough to be bought by IBM.

zapita 7y ago
> The thing is, this is how Redhat Wins and has been winning ... I think redhat won't disappear because of this leadership style, but this is how it has been getting contracts, making money, getting sponsorships, and being attractive enough to be bought by IBM. Very true. Red Hat is a very successful company by any measure. Paul played an important role in making that happen. At the same time, Red Hat also has a major problem which limits its long-term growth potential: lack of meaningful diversification. RHEL is still the lion's share of their revenue. It's a powerhouse of a business, but its growth is definitely reaching a plateau. So what comes next? As far as I can tell, the answer is: Openshift and Ansible. Both are successful products, for different reasons. But can they grow revenue fast enough to compensate for RHEL's gradual decline? The answer seems to be "not yet". I think Red Hat reached the same conclusion, realized that their stock price would likely peak in 2019/2020 as markets realize the problem, and decided to sell. And here's the thing: Paul also owns this problem. The failure to differentiate happened on his watch. If you believe Openshift/Ansible revenue is already on the same growth trajectory as RHEL, then success is a matter of execution, and Paul is the right guy for the job. But if you believe that Ansible and Openshift, while good, are just not as game-changing as RHEL once was - then no amount of execution will solve that problem. EDIT: I meant "diversification", not differentiation! My bad.
- oso2k 7y ago
  DISCLAIMER: I work for Red Hat Consulting. Red Hat almost doesn't sell RHEL by itself anymore [0][1]. RHEL is lumped into OpenShift, Quay, OCS, OpenStack, RHV and more often than not sold along side Ansible, Tower, JBoss, AMQ, Fuse, DecisionManager, etc. So, the revenue streams are being bundled together which makes it harder to tease out which product is pushing the Total Revenue line. Our integration with IBM might make that even harder to tell since they love to bundle everything into Cloud Paks [2]. You can review our 10Qs to understand our Revenue performance. What do you mean we lack differentiation? From who or what? Microsoft? AWS? Google? Canonical? SuSe? Apple? VMware? Pivotal? Docker? When we got acquired, we were the first $3B Open Source company with double-digit percentage growth [3]. And I think there is a brawl going on for big Corporate IT Cloud $$$. You might make the case that Red Hat was completely outgunned in a scenario where a $3B company wanted to compete against $100B companies (AWS, Google, MS, IBM). [0] https://www.redhat.com/en/store/linux-platforms https://www.redhat.com/en/store/linux-platforms [1] https://www.redhat.com/en/store/red-hat-middleware https://www.redhat.com/en/store/red-hat-middleware [2] https://www.ibm.com/cloud/paks/ https://www.ibm.com/cloud/paks/ [3] https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/red-hat-reports-first-quarter-results-fiscal-year-2020 https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/red-hat-repor...
  - zapita 7y ago
    My bad! I meant to say "lack of diversification", as in: too much revenue coming from a single product. I did not mean to say there was a lack of differentiation - that is a much more subjective and controversial topic. What I'm talking about is much more straightforward: most of the money comes from RHEL. RHEL is not growing as fast as it used to. And other sources of revenue, like Openshift and Ansible, are not growing fast enough to fill the gap.
  - zapita 7y ago
    > Red Hat almost doesn't sell RHEL by itself anymore [0][1]. RHEL is lumped into OpenShift, Quay, OCS, OpenStack, RHV and more often than not sold along side Ansible, Tower, JBoss, AMQ, Fuse, DecisionManager, etc. Right, but that only strengthens my point. Red Hat is bundling add-ons with RHEL in an effort to boost add-on sales. Without the bundling, those products would be doing considerably worse in the marketplace. > So, the revenue streams are being bundled together which makes it harder to tease out which product is pushing the Total Revenue line Again, this supports my point. Given the historical importance of RHEL revenue standalone, there is no good reason to bundle it with other streams, other than to hide something. What is being hidden, presumably, is exactly how much Red Hat still depends on good old RHEL renewal, as opposed to genuine demand for their new products.

notacoward 7y ago

When I joined Red Hat, I was pretty surprised to find such an "old school DEC" hardball player in charge of engineering. That's what Paul is, but he's not evil. He's effective, and at the most important level he does represent the values we associate with Red Hat (which he helped shape after all). I'd be far more worried if they'd brought in somebody from outside, or from another part of IBM.

rvp-x 7y ago

I wouldn't expect significant changes in RedHat just because Paul Cormier got moved up one rank. He isn't new to the company, and had a lot of influence in his previous role.