Red Hat, Inc. announced that it has named Paul Cormier as president and chief executive officer of Red Hat, effective April 6, 2020. Cormier, who previously served as Red Hat's president of Products and Technologies, succeeds Jim Whitehurst, who is now president of IBM. Since joining Red Hat in 2001, Cormier's leadership and vision have driven major strategy shifts and expansion of the company's portfolio of products and services.

Cormier is credited with pioneering the subscription model that transformed Red Hat from an open source disruptor to an enterprise technology mainstay, moving Red Hat Linux from a freely downloadable operating system to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the industry's leading enterprise Linux platform that powers more than 90% of Fortune 500 organizations. Cormier has driven more than 25 acquisitions at Red Hat, moving the company well beyond its Linux roots and helped create a full, modern IT stack based on open source innovation that disrupted the IT industry. The availability of true enterprise-grade open source products across the technology stack and changing business models have made open source a de facto source of innovation in the software industry, resulting in faster progress than proprietary vendors could provide alone.