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.
What’s your message to Red Hat channel partners?
Red Hat being a platform company, is what we do. It means you’re not the total solution. We are almost always partner focused. Whether it’s partners adding workloads, partners managing it, partners deployment of it — partners are that last-mile link for us.
I like to think we’re in the middle of open-source innovation, which [are] really exciting platforms for customers to be working with. Partners will surround everything we do, every single partner type.
That’s been true from the days of Linux. It could never be more true than in the AI moment right now of, ‘We play one role in that.’ Red Hat does a good job of staying in our swim lane really well and we let partners add value around it. It’s going to be an exciting partner time because they’ll be in the last mile. They’ll be with customers. They’ll know the customer challenges and we can hopefully help them get there faster.
That’s why if I was a partner, it’s a good time to be bullish on that because the customer demand will draw them to our platforms. And partners can add a lot of value around what we do for our customers.
