Tim Yeaton, a former Red Hat executive who most recently served as CEO of Black Duck Software, is returning to the Hatters in a newly created position to spearhead development of the company’s infrastructure services.
In another move, Red Hat also promoted Craig Muzilla, a middleware executive, to lead its applications platform group. The moves reflect Red Hat’s further embrace of “cloud” computing.
The appointments were announced early Monday before the markets opened.
Red Hat stock surged as 2013 ended, driven in part by strong growth in its cloud efforts and projections that OpenStack will dominate cloud operating systems. red Hat is the largest contributor to OpenStack.
Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) is banking heavily on cloud computing as a future business opportunity through expanded efforts of its Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform and support of the OpenStack platform as an open system for cloud applications development and support.
The moves are part of Red Hat’s moves to “realign” its products and technologies efforts in Infrastructure as a Service efforts that includes virtualization, cloud management, OpenStack related businesses and platforms.
Paul Cormier, president of Products and Technologies for Red Hat, said the changes reflect Red Hat’s determination to drive open source in cloud and related services.
“Over the last decade, open source and Linux have moved from a pure commodity play in the enterprise to the defining software development model in the industry. The cloud, and cloud-style computing, would simply not exist as we know them today without Linux and open source. Red Hat is in the unique position of driving many of the significant open source community projects that are driving next-generation enterprise technologies, and also bringing them to market,” Cormier said.
“By realigning our Products and Technologies organization, we’re well-positioned for success in driving these next-gen infrastructure, IaaS, and developer offerings. I’m thrilled to welcome Tim back to Red Hat at this exciting time to lead our Infrastructure Group, and to congratulate Craig as he steps into a new role leading our Applications Platform Group.”
Yeaton, a former executive at Dell and EqualLogic, worked at Red Hat earlier in his career as senior vice president for worldwide marketing and general manager of enterprise solutions. He led Black Duke through three acquisitions and helped developed a global organization that now operates in 23 countries.
“The IT industry is at its most dramatic architectural inflection point since the advent of client-server computing two decades ago – the emergence of cloud-based computing. Most of the innovation happening in cloud infrastructure, as well as in cloud enablement such as big data, mobility, cloud management, etc., is being catalyzed by open source technologies and community-driven development,” Yeaton said.
“Red Hat has an incredible opportunity to lead these shifts in IT, and its open hybrid cloud vision resonates strongly with many enterprise IT customers I’ve worked with over the last five years while at Black Duck. For me, the opportunity to rejoin Red Hat and lead the Group at the core of these industry changes is a once-in-a-lifetime one, and I’m very excited to be back at Red Hat and helping to drive the realization of the open hybrid cloud vision.”
