Tim Yeaton, SVP Infrastructure Group, Red Hat

Red Hat, Inc. announced that Tim Yeaton, former CEO of Black Duck Software and a onetime Red Hat executive, has rejoined the company in the newly-created position of SVP, infrastructure group.

 In this capacity, Yeaton will oversee the products and programs that are driving Red Hat’s infrastructure and IaaS business, including the platform, virtualization and OpenStack businesses, and Red Hat’s cloud management product line. He joins as the company realigns its existing products and technologies organization to take advantage of technology convergence – from Linux and OpenStack to middleware and Platform-as-a-Service – and capitalize on growing interest in open hybrid cloud.

In addition to the infrastructure group led by Yeaton, Red Hat also appointed its longtime middleware GM, Craig Muzilla, as SVP of the company’s newly-formed applications platform group. In his new role, Muzilla will be responsible for Red Hat’s developer-focused products and programs, including Red Hat JBoss middleware and OpenShift by Red Hat, the company’s PaaS offering. As head of middleware business, he has been instrumental in helping to drive Red Hat’s multi-product strategy and diverse portfolio, establish Red Hat as one of top middleware providers, expand the company’s middleware offerings, and increase its presence among developers.

Red Hat’s storage and big data team will continue to operate as a separate business, led by Sarangan Rangachari.

Yeaton brings more than 30 years of software and technology management experience to his new role. Under his leadership as its CEO, Black Duck has experienced more than 30% annualized Y/Y growth, completed three acquisitions, created a joint venture in greater China, and built a worldwide operation with a presence in 23 countries. Prior to joining Black Duck, he was CMO at EqualLogic until its acquisition by Dell in 2008, and as Dell‘s VP of the Nashua (N.H.) design center, he led the integration of the two companies and managed Dell’s operations in the region.

Prior to EqualLogic, Yeaton spent several years at Red Hat as SVP of WW marketing and GM of enterprise solutions. During his first tenure at Red Hat, he was instrumental in expanding the company’s business into the developer and middleware markets with acquisitions of JBoss and MetaMatrix, and built go-to-market partnerships with companies including IBM, HP, Dell, Oracle, and several others.

Earlier in his career, he was president, CEO and director of Avaki Corporation, a venture-backed data management software company acquired by Sybase (now part of SAP). Before that, he was SVP and GM of the server products division at Macromedia (now part of Adobe), via its acquisition of Allaire where he served as SVP of products. He spent the early part of his career at Compaq and Digital Equipment Corporation, including a role as VP and GM of Compaq’s Unix/Linux and middleware software division, where he drove Compaq’s pre-IPO investment in Red Hat.

In 2009 Yeaton was named one of the Most Influential People in the Open Source Software Industry, in a survey by Mindtouch. In 2010 he was named a COPU Think Tank Advisor, which recognizes the key global thought leaders in open source software. Also in 2010, the MA Technology Leadership Council named Yeaton a finalist for CEO of the Year.

Paul Cormier, president, products and technologies, Red Hat, said: “Over the last decade, open source and Linux have moved from a pure commodity play in the enterprise to the defining software development model in the industry. The cloud, and cloud-stye computing, would simply not exist as we know them today without Linux and open source. Red Hat is in the unique position of driving many of the significant open source community projects that are driving next-generation enterprise technologies, and also bringing them to market. By realigning our Products and Technologies organization, we’re well-positioned for success in driving these next-gen infrastructure, IaaS, and developer offerings. I’m thrilled to welcome Tim back to Red Hat at this exciting time to lead our Infrastructure Group, and to congratulate Craig as he steps into a new role leading our applications platform froup.”

Tim Yeaton, SVP, infrastructure group, Red Hat, said: “The IT industry is at its most dramatic architectural inflection point since the advent of client-server computing two decades ago – the emergence of cloud-based computing. Most of the innovation happening in cloud infrastructure, as well as in cloud enablement such as big data, mobility, cloud management, etc., is being catalyzed by open source technologies and community-driven development. Red Hat has an incredible opportunity to lead these shifts in IT, and its open hybrid cloud vision resonates strongly with many enterprise IT customers I’ve worked with over the last five years while at Black Duck. For me, the opportunity to rejoin Red Hat and lead the Group at the core of these industry changes is a once-in-a-lifetime one, and I’m very excited to be back at Red Hat and helping to drive the realization of the open hybrid cloud vision.”