Software News
CEO Matt Hicks On Red Hat Layoffs, IBM’s Open Source Vision
Mark Haranas
“[Layoffs are] a healthy thing that you have to do every once in awhile to make sure you’re putting investment in the right areas that are going to help you keep being successful with customers,” Red Hat CEO Matt Hicks tells CRN.
There’s been massive layoffs throughout the IT industry this year. Red Hat recently laid off around 800 employees. Do you expect any more layoffs at Red Hat?
For us, we have a really, really good opportunity right now. Being really thoughtful about making sure you can invest in that opportunity is critical. So for us, it was a rebalancing move.
We’re in this moment of AI. We have this impact on developer and operations efficiency and security. We need to be able to put enough in engineering and in sales to be able to take advantage of that to help customers move forward and adopt that.
So I can’t speak to other companies of whether that was their stance, but that was our intent with it.
But it was really more of an acceleration focus for us than anything else. I think it’s a healthy thing that you have to do every once in awhile to make sure you’re putting investment in the right areas that are going to help you keep being successful with customers.
