Fran Foo | June 03, 2008
world according to | Jim Whitehurst
IT must have been hell on earth for Jim Whitehurst in his last days at Delta Airlines.
About two months after resigning in late August, he received a call to meet Red Hat head honcho Matthew Szulik for the top job at the open source software and services company.
Szulik, who was set to become Red Hat chairman then, didn't have to do any hard selling. It was like "you got me at hello", Whitehurst says.
When Whitehurst's appointment was announced in late December, the open source world went into a frenzy. The main worry was a virtual unknown replacing Szulik and concerns about whether Whitehurst knew anything about technology.
The concerns proved groundless. The former Boston Consulting Group director is a self-confessed Linux fan, having dabbled in various Linux distributions himself for some time.
Whitehurst says Red Hat has hit the big time with blue-chip clients such as the New York Stock Exchange and National Australia Bank, but he recognises the company still has a long way to go.
How have your first few months at Red Hat been?
I've looped the globe twice in my first 100 days, so I was actually on an airplane much more than when I actually ran an airline.
Things have been phenomenal. The main point of difference is that Red Hat is very profitable and my former employer lost $6 billion last quarter.
I've been spending a lot of time on the road talking to customers, employees and partners, and the biggest complaint is from customers saying they wish we would do more things so they could engage us even more. It's a great position to be in.
I certainly understand open source and was quite a big user of Linux before I joined Red Hat.
Which distros were you using?
Fedora! Many years ago I used Slack and I have to admit that I played around with Ubuntu, PCLinux but I've mainly been a Fedora user for a long time.
When I first got the call about the Red Hat job, it was the first time my wife truly saw me light up in a long, long time.
It's an incredibly powerful economic model but I guess from my personal perspective it is an extraordinary opportunity because it's so new.
Take an airline for instance. The canvas has already been painted, so you're tweaking a little bit on the margin. Here it's a completely white canvas, and a superior way to develop software.
We have an opportunity to redefine major chunks of the way software is developed and the opportunity to play a lead role in that is extraordinary.
I wake up every day and it's a thrill just to come to work.
I certainly understood the power of the open source model and the opportunity for us to really change the way software is developed, but I don't think I fully conceptualised that before joining.
When did you get the call from Red Hat?
It happened in early October. It came in via a headhunter and three days later I was up in Raleigh (North Carolina, where Red Hat is headquartered) on a Sunday morning having coffee with Matthew Szulik.
He and I hit it off very quickly and we continue to build a really nice rapport. Frankly I was not interested in anything else once this opportunity came up.
So he didn't have to do a lot of convincing?
Having dabbled in the product and known the company from afar, I was 95 per cent of the way there.
Matthew spent some time trying to convince me and I was laughing about that because it was just like the Jerry Maguire movie: you had me at hello.
What goals have you set for the next six months?
I travelled around extensively for the first 100 days or so because I wanted to form my own opinion.
Some executives sit in their offices and get reports but I feel that generally doesn't work.
The plan is to spend the first few months meeting customers, employees and partners and as a follow-up to that I want to articulate very clearly our goals for the next five years and the key objectives to get there.
I want to get a better idea of where we want to be by the end of this year, and the following years, our top five priorities, and ensure we're fully resourced to get there.
What was your first impression on meeting Red Hat employees?
I've moved from always being the young guy to now being the old guy! I'm not used to that.
I've been taken aback by the raw passion of the people at Red Hat and the quality of the people throughout the company.
I take nothing away from our human resources department but I don't necessarily think it's the slickest in the industry, and the fact that they've been able to attract these people attests to the power of the Red Hat brand and mission.
What are the challenges in getting skilled personnel especially when other companies, such as Google, are vying for the same pool?
Getting the best and the brightest engineers is always difficult.
One thing I find amazing is that, because of our model and the collaborative way open source projects work, this company is very good at sourcing from around the world.
For instance, three of my direct reports are in Raleigh, North Carolina, another lives in Washington, another in Boston and we have pockets of concentration in Boston, the Czech Republic, Beijing and Brisbane.
Do you think there will be a wide proliferation of desktop Linux machines and if so, when?
It has to seen as consumer versus corporate.
Obviously we have a strong view that the corporate market is important. We've made major investments in Red Hat Enterprise Desktop.
In a corporate setting there's a lot of value in running almost any enterprise application in this environment. You don't get attacked by so many viruses. It's more secure and more affordable.
For a paid consumer desktop, firstly, I'm not sure why you should pay for it.
Some people ask us why we aren't in the consumer desktop space, but we are. It's called Fedora. If you don't need high levels of support you shouldn't have to pay anything.
My simple answer is until Apple's iTunes runs on consumer Linux desktops, it's not going to take off. I know you can run Wine, which runs Windows applications on Linux, so techies will beat me up on that, but fundamentally there are some major device driver issues with products that people like to use and this limits adoption. It's going to be slow until these issues are solved.
You've said you want Red Hat to be a $1 billion company in three years.
I hope it will take less time than that.
How does the international market fit into your game plan?
I believe there are many more opportunities outside the US for the simple reason that throughout the world nobody wants to be paying massive amounts back to the US for intellectual property.
Paying billions of dollars to someone in Redmond, Washington, isn't the best public policy decision. From the government's perspective as well as knowledge transfer, many of our competitors aren't shipping their source code outside the country because they're worried it's going to disappear, but we're very big and open about sharing.
Obviously we don't engage in proprietary software as a business and we believe that what we do promotes a freer and more open exchange of technology, which translates into dollars staying in-country because we sell service and support and not intellectual property.
Australia is a great market for us. It's a developed economy with a very sophisticated technical workforce and that works well for us because our products generally play well with more technical audiences.
Matt Szulik has always enjoyed a high profile in the press. Can you match that?
The day my appointment was announced someone called me and asked how it felt to be the leader of the free world.
There is a certain persona that the chief executive of Red Hat is the leader of the open source world. I'm fully comfortable with that and recognise the need for me to be in the public eye, but open source has grown up. We're running the New York Stock Exchange for instance.
I will certainly be out there a lot, but I will probably be a lot less colourful than Matt and part of that is because of my personality. I want to be authentic about who I am.
Open source software and services as a business have changed a lot. Has Red Hat has made it in the corporate market?
Seventy per cent of the Fortune 1000 are our customers, so certainly we've made it from that perspective.
We're sitting at the table with large companies and we've built credibility and provided value, and that's reflected in surveys on how we're viewed, but there's much more we can do.
We're certainly seen as the leader of open source and for me it's a great time to be here.
We've established the brand, yet we've barely scratched the surface. Worldwide, corporate enterprise infrastructure software as a market is about $120 billion.