Will Red Hat’s ex-CTO come back to haunt Hatters in Google’s ‘cloud’ play?

Will the loss of its chief technology officer come back to haunt Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), especially in the “cloud”?

Tech news sites ZDnet and CRN say Brian Stevens, who quit as chief technology officer at Red Hat a month ago, will play a key role in his new job at Google in the Internet giant’s “cloud computing” push. Red Hat is banking a good part of its future on the cloud, too, having made several acquisitions and pouring development efforts into support of pc- and server-sharing infrastructure.

“If you didn’t think that Google was deadly serious about taking out Amazon Web Services (AWS) as the top public cloud company and making sure that Microsoft Azure never has a chance to become a hybrid cloud power, think again. With the hiring of Red Hat’s former CTO Brian Stevens as its vice-president of cloud platforms, Google serves notice to the cloud world that Google wants to be number one cloud provider,” writes Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols at ZDnet.

Vaughn-Nichols is the same reporter who broke the news about Stevens’ departure two weeks ago, citing possible internal disputes as the reason.

Red Hat has had little to say about Stevens’ departure.

In his recently updated LinkedIn profile, Stevens acknowledges working at Google for a month. ZDnet first reported Stevens’ new job on Wednesday.

Stevens lists his new job as “Vice President Cloud Platforms at Google.”

Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) has not formally announced Stevens’ hiring or role.

But CRN believes Stevens will have a “major role.”

“While Google is a latecomer to the cloud market, it’s expected to have plenty of impact on its future direction, and the highly regarded Stevens will presumably be playing a major role in what’s coming next,” CRN reports.

“Google is locked in a price war with Microsoft and Amazon Web Services in the cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service space and also sells Platform-as-a-Service. Its Cloud Platform portfolio also includes object storage, database, big data and other services.”

Stevens, a long-time veteran at Red Hat, helped spearhead the Hatters’ cloud strategy and its embrace of OpenStack, which is rapidly emerging as an industry standard. He also was a key to red Hat’s embrace of another hot trend: so-called “Docker containers.”

OpenStack is not the basis for Google;s Compute Engine, ZDnet notes, so perhaps that’s a key reason why Stevens was hired.

Google also is no stranger to Linux – Red Hat’s bread-and-butter.

“[Google Compute Engine] natively supports Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES). It also supports a variety of other Linux distributions such as CoreOS, Debian, and CentOS. GCE, like RHEL, also now supports Docker containers,” ZDnet says.

Google also has big plans to expand its cloud efforts.

“Managing all of this will be a big job, but, given his track record, I think Stevens will be up for the challenge,” Vaughan-Nichols says.

While Google is a latecomer to the cloud market, it’s expected to have plenty of impact on its future direction, and the highly regarded Stevens will presumably be playing a major role in what’s coming next.

Google is locked in a price war with Microsoft and Amazon Web Services in the cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service space and also sells Platform-as-a-Service. Its Cloud Platform portfolio also includes object storage, database, big data and other services.