Executive leadership team

Michael Ferris is Senior Vice President, Chief Operating Officer, and Chief Strategy Officer at Red Hat. In this role, he is focused on building the company’s global business strategy across all offerings and services, mergers and acquisitions, market-making partnerships, and internal operations.

For more than 25 years at Red Hat, Ferris has focused on the value of the company’s business model and serving the needs of customers, partners and open source communities. He served as the first product manager for Red Hat® Enterprise Linux®, and he later led the evolution of Red Hat’s subscriptions from capacity to consumption models. This allowed for Red Hat products on public cloud providers and led to the creation of Red Hat Certified Cloud and Service Provider Program, which includes more than 1,300 Red Hat partners and lets customers use multi- and hybrid-cloud paradigms across the entire Red Hat portfolio.

Ferris has also worked to define the company’s business architecture, leading strategy and business negotiations on high-profile partnerships as well. These efforts have enabled Red Hat to combine the open source development model with its value propositions and various subscription models to meet changing market needs. Ferris is responsible for leading Red Hat’s efforts to become an AI-focused organization. 

Ferris is an inventor or co-inventor of more than 85 issued U.S. patents in the cloud computing space, all of which are covered under Red Hat's patent promise in support and defense of open source development.