IBM announced on Thursday that James Whitehurst, CEO of Red Hat and IBM senior vice president, will be the business’ next president.
Whitehurst will assume the position on Feb. 6, NASDAQ reported. He will take over for Virginia Rometty, who became chairman, president and CEO of IBM in 2012.
Rometty will continue as executive chairman of the board. Arvind Krishna was elected CEO of the company and a member of the Board of Directors, effective April 6.
“Jim is also a seasoned leader who has positioned Red Hat as the world’s leading provider of open source enterprise IT software solutions and services, and has been quickly expanding the reach and benefit of that technology to an even wider audience as part of IBM,” Rometty said in a press release. “In Arvind and Jim, the Board has elected a proven technical and business-savvy leadership team.”
Whitehurst joined Red Hat in December 2007 after spending six years at Delta Air Lines as COO and in charge of international expansion.
He graduated from Rice University with a bachelor’s degree in economics and computer science, according to his LinkedIn.com account. He also received a General Course degree from the London School of Economics and an MBA from Harvard in 1994.
Red Hat became the first $1 billion revenue open source software company in 2012. The company reported revenue of almost $3 billion for the company’s 2018 fiscal year.
Red Hat has been recognized by Forbes, Standard and Poor’s 500, Glassdoor and Baron’s under Whitehurst’s leadership.
Has Red Hat’s Jim Whitehurst set himself up to succeed CEO Rometty at IBM?
