JIM WHITEHURST is president and chief executive officer of Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source enterprise IT products and services. With a background in business development, finance, and global operations, Whitehurst has proven expertise in helping companies flourish—even in the most challenging economic and business environments. Since joining Red Hat in 2008, Whitehurst has grown the company, and its influence in a variety of industries, by reaching key milestones—the most notable in 2012 when Red Hat became the first $1 billion revenue open source software company.
Under Whitehurst’s leadership, Red Hat has been recognized on Forbes’s “Fastest-Growing Technology Companies” list in 2011, ranked seventh on Investor’s Business Daily’s “Top 10 New American Companies” list in 2011, and ranked on Forbes’s list of “The World’s Most Innovative Companies” in 2012 and 2014. Red Hat was selected for inclusion in the Standard & Poor’s (S&P) 500 stock index in 2009, and named by Glassdoor in 2014 as one of the best places to work.
Red Hat’s product portfolio has expanded through several strategic acquisitions since Whitehurst joined the company, including Qumranet, Inc. (virtualization), Makara (Platform-as-a-Service [PaaS]), Gluster (storage), FuseSource (middleware), Polymita (middleware), ManageIQ (cloud management), Inktank (storage), eNovance (OpenStack), and FeedHenry (middleware). By incorporating these technologies, Red Hat has become the only open source company that can offer an open source cloud stack that includes an operating system, middleware, and virtualization. The company also revealed its open hybrid cloud technology vision for the future of IT, including plans for building and managing Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and PaaS public and private clouds.
As its portfolio grows, Red Hat continues to influence the future of technology by supporting open source projects like OpenStack, Fedora, and GlusterFS, and by defending patent law legislation, including amicus submissions to the US Supreme Court. Open Source for America, a coalition advocating for open source software in government, also launched in 2009, with Red Hat as a founding member. In 2010, Red Hat unveiled opensource.com, a website that explores the role of open source in business, government, law, and life, and brings the open source message to a much broader audience.
Whitehurst continues to advocate for open, nonproprietary data and technology. He speaks at conferences throughout the world and at top research universities, including Harvard Business School, Duke University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Whitehurst is often asked to appear as a guest on CNBC, Bloomberg, and Fox Business.
Whitehurst began his career in 1989 at The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) in Chicago and held several corporate development leadership roles at the firm. Over the next decade, he worked in BCG’s Chicago, Hong Kong, and Shanghai offices and as a partner in the Atlanta office, with numerous clients across a wide range of industries. He was named partner at BCG in 2000.
On September 11, 2001, the Delta Air Lines leadership team asked Whitehurst to serve as its acting treasurer. That same week, he led the company’s secured debt offering, winning the Thomson-IVR “Deal of the Year” for reopening the capital markets. In 2002, he joined Delta Air Lines full-time as senior vice president–finance, treasury, and business development. He was promoted again in 2004 to chief network and planning officer, a position from which he drove significant international expansion. He was named chief operating officer in 2005, overseeing all aspects of airline operations, including sales, marketing, operations, and strategy.
Whitehurst graduated from Rice University in Houston, Texas, in 1989 with a bachelor of arts degree in economics and computer science. He also attended Fredrick Alexander University in Erlangen, Germany, and holds a general course degree from the London School of Economics. He earned his MBA from Harvard in 1994. In 2007, while COO of Delta Air Lines, Whitehurst was nominated as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. In March 2014, he was honored with the William C. Friday Award, an annual award presented by the senior class of Park Scholars, North Carolina State University’s merit scholarship program, honoring Friday’s dedication and excellence in leadership, scholarship, service, and character.
Whitehurst lives in Durham, North Carolina, with his wife and twins. He is a member of the board of directors of DigitalGlobe, Inc., Duke University Health System, and The Conservation Fund. He also sits on the executive committee of the North Carolina Chamber of Commerce.