Explore what's next by hearing from industry pioneers
Red Hat® Summit 2024 represents an opportunity to share experiences and impact as we plot the future of open technology.
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Discover new perspectives on the current and future technology landscape with insights from open source leaders.
Matt Hicks
President and CEO, Red Hat
Matt Hicks was named President and Chief Executive Officer of Red Hat in July 2022. In his previous role, he was Executive Vice President of Products and Technologies where he was responsible for all product engineering, including products such as Red Hat OpenShift®, Red Hat Enterprise Linux®, the JBoss® middleware portfolio, OpenStack® and Ansible®.
He has been with Red Hat for 16 years, watching it grow from a single-product company to the multi-billion-dollar enterprise it is today. He was also one of the founding members of the OpenShift team and has been at the forefront of cloud computing ever since.
With more than 25 years of Linux experience and a background in computer engineering, Hicks has always had a passion for combining infrastructure and application technologies. His engineering background includes several years at IBM, as well as startup experience, where he served in various roles spanning engineering, IT, and consulting. This breadth of experience has allowed Hicks to use technology to solve customer and business problems across all areas of IT. With technology innovation converging on open source, Linux, and containers, his experience has placed him at the center of what he believes to be the most exciting time in industry history.
Chris Wright
Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President, Global Engineering, Red Hat
Chris Wright is Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President of Global Engineering at Red Hat. He leads a team that guides Red Hat’s technology vision, co-creates technologies, and collaboratively implements change to ensure the success of Red Hat’s ecosystem of associates, customers, communities, and partners.
Wright’s organization includes: Office of the CTO, Ecosystem Engineering, Product Security, Global Engineering Associate Experience, Product Engineering, Experience Engineering, and CTO Customer-Led Open Innovation.
During his 25+ years as a software engineer, Wright has worked in the telecommunications industry and beyond on high-availability and distributed systems. He also has experience in the Linux industry on security, virtualization, and networking. Wright has been a Linux developer for more than 15 years, with most of this time spent working deep in the Linux kernel. He is passionate about open source software serving as the foundation for next-generation IT systems.
Stefanie Chiras
Senior Vice President, Partner Ecosystem Success, Red Hat
Stefanie Chiras is Senior Vice President of Partner Ecosystem Success at Red Hat. She leads Red Hat’s global partner ecosystem engagement to foster relevance for our customers and growth for our partners.
She focuses on setting the global partner strategy and establishing clear paths for partner success across the entire ecosystem. Chiras plays a critical role in articulating the value of Red Hat’s product portfolio and defining the strategy for partnering with Red Hat for customer success.
Chiras has held several senior product leadership positions at Red Hat, most recently as Senior Vice President of the Platforms Business Group, where she was responsible for defining, building, and executing the company’s cross-platform strategy and the products that support it.
Prior to that, Chiras was Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux organization at Red Hat, where she was responsible for the entire product line.
Before Red Hat, Chiras served as Vice President of Offering Management at IBM Cognitive Systems. As part of the Cognitive Systems brand team, she led worldwide business for the systems and system software portfolios, AIX, IBM i, Linux, and the cloud stack. She also led the portfolio’s transformation to support enterprise workloads and artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning.
Chiras has extensive experience in both business and technology. Her technical roles range from silicon technology to system architecture, as well as both IBM Power Systems and IBMz processor design. She also has served as a member of IBM’s Research Division and IBM Systems and Technology Group.
Ashesh Badani
Senior Vice President and Chief Product Officer, Red Hat
Ashesh Badani is the Senior Vice President and Chief Product Officer at Red Hat. In this role, he is responsible for the company’s overall product portfolio and business unit groups, including product strategy, business planning, product management, marketing, and operations across on-premise, public cloud, and edge.
His product responsibilities include Red Hat Enterprise Linux®, Red Hat OpenShift®, Red Hat Ansible Automation®, developer tools, and middleware, as well as emerging cloud services and experiences.
Previously, Badani was Senior Vice President of Cloud Platforms, where he helped solidify the company as a hybrid cloud and enterprise Kubernetes leader. Under his leadership, Red Hat has also expanded OpenShift® from an award-winning Platform-as-a-Service solution to the industry’s leading enterprise Kubernetes platform, with 1,000+ customers spanning all regions and industries. Badani started at Red Hat overseeing product line management and marketing for the Red Hat JBoss® Enterprise Application Platform middleware portfolio.
Badani has played a significant role around strategy, analysis, and integration for key Red Hat acquisitions—including StackRox in 2021, CoreOS in 2018, and FuseSource in 2012—to bolster the company’s integration portfolio.
Prior to joining Red Hat, Badani served as Director of Product Management and Product Marketing of Integration and Application Platform Products at Sun Microsystems. He has more than 20 years of experience in the technology and finance industries at both established and emerging companies.