Sometime big has changed when a former Delta Airlines COO takes over as the CEO of a technology company like Red Hat.
Red Hat isn’t a little startup trying to convert people to Linux. It’s a business selling to big corporations. It needs leadership used to selling enterprises.Also, if Red Hat can reasonably expect to compete to supply half of the worldwide server market by 2015, it will really have to scale. Companies like Delta are about systems and logistics, the sort of things one needs to really scale.
James Whitehurst, of course, wouldn't be the first non-technology executive brought in to head a technology company. Lou Gerstner transformed IBM into a services company, using a background of RJR Nabisco and American Express.
The choice shows how mainstream open source has become. Red Hat needs to sell to enterprise executives, with huge scale.
