Red Hat Hires Middleware Industry Veteran Steve Hess

Today we are pleased to announce that Steve Hess has joined Red Hat. Steve will serve as senior director for product management in the JBoss Middleware Business Unit, and joins our team after spending the last eight years at BEA Systems/Oracle.

By attracting industry veterans like Steve and building up our middleware team with other key hires from the middleware product units of Sun and IBM, we continue to position JBoss to take advantage of the momentum around widespread open source middleware adoption. This is especially important as we see Red Hat’s value proposition resonate with customers as they are forced to carve costs out of the datacenter.

At Red Hat, Steve will be responsible for leading and managing the product management group across JBoss products. Steve and his team will work closely with the open source community, engineering, and field organizations to establish middleware product strategies and drive JBoss products to market.

While at BEA Systems/Oracle, Steve served as the senior director of product management for the WebLogic Server product family where he led a team of product managers responsible for BEA’s $350 million flagship product line. Prior to BEA, Steve held product management and technical research roles for several software companies and research organizations. Additionally, Steve holds a Ph.D from Pennsylvania State University and a BA from Indiana University of Pennsylvania.

The fact that top talent like Steve continue to gravitate to Red Hat speaks volumes about the lure of working for the leading open source provider. For Steve it was the opportunity to deliver technology solutions to customers through the open source development model. Which ever their motivation it is clear that our work ethic, culture of freedom and authenticity ring true to people across the globe, not only with our customers but also with our employees.