RALEIGH – Former Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst has a new board assignment – he’s now an independent director at Tanium, a provider of data security services and technology.
Whitehurst, who left his No. 2 job at IBM last summer but remains listed as a “senior advisor,” also is a “Special Advisor” to private equity firm Silver Lake.
Whitehurst’s new role was announced Monday.
Tanium is based in Kirkland, Wash.
“Tanium technology delivers organizations the unique ability to immediately cast a light on devices known and unknown in order to secure potential entry points from cyber criminals,” said Whitehurst in the announcement. “This capability, paired with immediate remediation, is even more pertinent, as we were just recently reminded with the discovery of the Log4j vulnerability. I look forward to working with an esteemed team of industry experts to extend this capability to organizations that are hindered with the lack of visibility that is key to building and maintaining a strong security foothold.”
Whitehurst led Red Hat for 12 years and negotiated its acquisition by IBM in 2019 for $34 billion. He later was named president of IBM.
“Jim’s extensive knowledge of open source software is an invaluable asset to the Tanium team and comes at a time when organizations around the world are scrambling to mitigate the most severe threat the industry has seen by leveraging publicly shared libraries,” said Orion Hindawi, co-founder and CEO, Tanium. “As more companies continue to build on open source, we will continue to see the exploiting of flaws by cybercriminals that have a devastating effect. We look forward to working closely with Jim to help our customers stay ahead of the problem and lobby for real-time data instead of tiger team calls.”
