Paul Cormier

Paul Cormier is Chairman of Red Hat. He has been with the company since 2001 and previously served as President and Chief Executive Officer. During his tenure, he has driven much of the company’s open hybrid cloud strategy, playing an instrumental role in expanding Red Hat’s portfolio to a full, modern IT stack based on open source innovation.

Cormier joined Red Hat as Executive Vice President of Engineering, eventually moving into the leadership role of President of Products and Technologies. His leadership and experience in enterprise technology helped to pioneer a commercial business model for open source software, moving open source innovation from passionate communities to broad adoption from the datacenter to the cloud. He is credited with leading efforts to introduce an enterprise subscription model, leading to the development of Red Hat Enterprise Linux®.

Cormier also pioneered the vision for one open hybrid cloud platform that could span traditional, on-premises hardware to multiple clouds. As part of this vision, he has been instrumental in forging strategic partnerships with many leading technology companies, enabling technologies to work across hybrid enterprise IT environments and multiple clouds. Including playing a major role in 2019 when IBM acquired Red Hat for $34 billion — the industry’s largest software acquisition to date.