Paul Cormier became Red Hat’s new CEO this week — while the entire company was working from home. He had to make his inaugural address to over 12,000 employees around the world using BlueJeans videoconferencing tools, reports a North Carolina newspaper:
In some ways, Red Hat was well prepared to work through the disruptions of coronavirus. For years, the company has encouraged and accepted employees who have wanted to work from home. It’s been a big part of its recruiting efforts, Cormier said. “Especially in engineering, our strategy has always been hire the best person, we don’t care where they are.”
That doesn’t mean it has been unscathed. The company has had to change its sales and product conference this year into a virtual event and social isolation obviously puts a strain on relationships with customers. And while the company wouldn’t give out an exact number of employees who have be infected by COVID-19, a spokeswoman for Red Hat said, “We have cases around the globe — people who are presumed to be sick, people who are sick and, happily, people who have recovered.”
Cormier said he’s committed to taking care of the thousands of employees affected by work-from-home orders across the globe. Red Hat, he said, will pay all of its employees during this time regardless of whether “you’re 140% productive or 40% productive.”
Cormier also emphasized he’s committed to keeping Red Hat a “totally, totally separate company” from IBM, saying that was agreed upon from the beginning with IBM’s new CEO Arvind Krishna. “If we’re not independent, then the other cloud guys won’t feel safe working with us… Intel, for example, shares their road map, which is super top secret, with us five years in advance, because we have to build the OS to support all their features….”
He also noted that Red Hat’s finance, legal, communications and human resources teams are all separate from IBM. “IBM doesn’t set our road map. We set our road map,” he said.
Where the company has seen a lot of success together, though, is in combining sales efforts. In its last earnings call, IBM said Red Hat was seeing an increase in large deals worth more than $10 million after joining IBM. One of them was with Verizon, for example.
of this story at Slashdot.
Source:: Slashdot