Red Hat’s got a new head

RED HAT head honcho Matthew Szulik is stepping down and will be replaced by the former operations boss of Delta Airlines. Szulik has let it be known that family health issues had made his job untenable.

I only met him once, at a press junket a few years ago where he displayed an admirable aptitude for corny jokes, a taste for excellent Burgundy, and a quote-making line in straight talking. It seemed to me that Szulik was a typical software CEO in that he is a fast-talking, whip-smart, wisecracking storyteller. It also seemed to me that he was an atypical software CEO in that he seemed to have managed to have avoided the 10 tons of ego that are harnessed to the backs of many industry peers. Having been running the show since Red Hat went public in 1999 he will certainly be missed, although he will stay on as chairman.

Szulik’s departure comes at an interesting juncture for Red Hat. The company is entrenched as the biggest deal in open source software but it is struggling to make sense of its JBoss middleware acquisition and is just making its first move into message queuing with the announcement of MRG. If it were your usual business software company it would be a very obvious purchase for IBM, Oracle et al, but its dependence on the Floss movement means it will probably go it alone.

However, that opinion is not shared by all. Matt Asay of open-source ECM firm Alfresco believes that Red Hat "now needs to be acquired by Oracle" and adds that Szulik's exit has shaken his faith in the company.

The appointment of Jim Whitehurst to replace Szulik is likely to occasion more hand-wringing given his limited experience in software. However, Szulik always positioned Red Hat as a services company and this would appear to be a carefully managed handover.

Szulik made his announcement in a public statement where he quoted the most famous passage of Jack Kerouac’s novel On The Road:

“The only people for me are the mad ones. The ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved. Desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue center light pop and everybody goes awwwwww.”

Incidentally, that was the passage that gave a young Kerouac his first great review and the same passage that helped prompt a young Bob Dylan to make his way out of the Minnesota backwater where he grew up. Just thought you’d like to know that. µ