Red Hat

Red Hat is an American open-source company headquartered in Raleigh, North Carolina, founded in March 1993 by Bob Young and Marc Ewing. The firm grew out of the merger of ACC Corporation (a Linux/Unix software business Young started in 1993) with the Red Hat Linux distribution Ewing created in 1994 (the so-called 'Halloween release' — October 1994); the name comes from his grandfather's red Cornell lacrosse hat. The August 11, 1999 NASDAQ IPO was the eighth-largest first-day gain in Wall Street history. The company joined the NASDAQ-100 in December 2005 and the S&P 500 on July 27, 2009. On October 28, 2018, IBM announced the acquisition of Red Hat for $34 billion — the deal closed on July 9, 2019, making Red Hat an independent subsidiary within the IBM Hybrid Cloud Division. On January 12, 2026, the company underwent a legal conversion from Red Hat, Inc. to Red Hat, LLC. The current CEO is Matt Hicks (since 2022), with Paul Cormier as chairman. The key products are the flagship Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), the OpenShift container platform, the Ansible automation platform (acquired in 2015 for ~$100M), the JBoss EAP middleware (acquired in 2006 for $350M) and the newer AI platforms: Red Hat AI (umbrella), Red Hat OpenShift AI (Kubeflow-based MLOps), RHEL AI (with InstructLab and IBM's Granite models) and Ansible Lightspeed (with IBM watsonx Code Assistant). Red Hat sponsors the Fedora Project and is the fourth-largest contributor to the Linux kernel (after Intel, Meta and Google, as of 2026). Key acquisitions: Cygnus Solutions (1999), JBoss (2006, $350M), Qumranet/KVM (2008), ManageIQ/CloudForms (2012, ~$100M), Inktank/Ceph (2014, $175M), Ansible (2015, ~$100M), CoreOS/Quay (2018, ~$250M).