Former Red Hat CTO now head of Google Cloud

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Brian Stevens, the former chief technology officer for Red Hat, is now managing Google Cloud.

As Red Hat CTO, Stevens was instrumental in preparing the enterprise Linux software provider for the cloud, including its adoption of the OpenStack software for running cloud services.

According to his LinkedIn profile, Stevens is now a vice president of Google cloud platforms. Google has not announced that Stevens has joined the company and has not responded to a request for comment.

Although somewhat of a late bloomer in the market for cloud infrastructure and platform services, Google re-energised and streamlined its marketing efforts in March, under the new “Google Cloud Platform” nameplate.

Stevens joined Red Hat in 2001, just as the company started expanding beyond its core Linux distribution, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, to offer a full stack of enterprise infrastructure software.

The company acquired JBoss, which offered an open-source Java application server, in 2006. In 2011, Red Hat acquired Gluster, keeper of the GlusterFS file system, and in 2012, it acquired FuseSource, which oversaw an open-source messaging stack.

During Stevens’ tenure, Red Hat prepared itself for the new market of cloud computing. In 2008, Red Hat acquired Qumranet, which brought to Red Hat a number of virtualisation technologies, such as the Kernel-based Virtual Machine and the Spice remote rendering protocol.

Red Hat also brought the OpenStack and Docker open-source cloud technologies to its stack. Analysis firm 451 Research estimated that, by 2016, OpenStack would generate $1.7 billion (€1.31 billion) in business for the IT industry.

At Google, Stevens will be involved with a number of cloud computing services, including the Google Compute Engine, Google App Engine, as well as a range of storage and analysis services.

Stevens’ LinkedIn profile lists expertise in Unix and Linux, enterprise architecture, distributed systems, clustering and high availability computing, storage management, virtualisation and cloud computing.

Stevens also serves on the boards of various organisations, including the OpenStack Foundation, the IEEE Computer Society, open-source analytics software provider Pentaho and storage company DataGravity.

Joab Jackson, IDG News Service 

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