Red Hat CEO in whirlwind Oz visit

Red Hat president and CEO Jim Whitehurst arrived in Australia yesterday for the first time, with plans to meet major customers and government representatives.

Jim Whitehurst
(Credit: Red Hat)

Whitehurst, who is staying until Wednesday, plans to visit Melbourne, Canberra and Sydney. During his visit Whitehurst will also be launching a Red Hat campaign dubbed the Open Source Collaborative Innovation (OSCI).

"OSCI is aimed at ... making more open source solutions available to the market through valuable partnerships, the development of open source skills and nurturing and building active open source communities," Whitehurst said in a statement.

Whitehurst was the CEO of Delta Airlines prior to his position at Red Hat, formally taking the reins at Red Hat on 1 January of this year. He replaced Matthew Szulik.

When interviewed by ZDNet.com.au's sister site CNET News.com, Whitehurst named cloud computing as his number one priority. "The clouds will all run Linux," he said, citing Amazon's "Elastic Compute Cloud", which runs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Stay tuned for ZDNet.com.au's interview with Whitehurst coming soon.