Red Hat Europe, Middle East, & Africa Analyst Day

Senior Vice President, Corporate Development and Strategy

Michael Ferris is Senior Vice President of Corporate Development and Strategy at Red Hat. In this role, he is focused on building the company’s global business strategy across all offerings and services, mergers and acquisitions, and market-making partnerships.

Ferris, who has been with Red Hat for more than 20 years, has focused on the company’s business model and worked to define its business architecture, leading strategy and business negotiations with high-profile partners and leading the evolution of Red Hat’s subscriptions from capacity to consumption models.

Ferris is either the sole or a teamed inventor of more than 85 issued U.S. patents in the space of cloud computing, all of which are covered under Red Hat's patent promise in support and defense of open source development.

Senior Vice President of Products

Ashesh Badani is Senior Vice President, Head of Products at Red Hat, where he leads the company’s broad hybrid cloud portfolio. This includes product development and go-to-market strategies for Red Hat® OpenShift®, Red Hat OpenStack® Platform, Red Hat Virtualization, and Red Hat developer tools. Under Badani’s leadership, the company 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.

Previously, 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.

President and Chief Executive Officer

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 product engineering for much of the company’s portfolio, including Red Hat® OpenShift® and Red Hat Enterprise Linux®. He is one of the founding members of the OpenShift team and has been at the forefront of cloud computing ever since.

Prior to joining Red Hat 16 years ago, Hicks served in various roles spanning computer engineering, IT, and consulting. He has worked with Linux and open source for more than 25 years, and his breadth of experience has helped him solve customer and business problems across all areas of IT.

Chief Technology Officer, FIWARE

Juanjo Hierro is Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of the FIWARE Foundation and chairman of the FIWARE Technical Steering Committee and coordinating FIWARE Tech Roadmap. He also supports development of the vision and value proposition of FIWARE in the several domains where it is being applied. His leading role in several standardization and open source initiatives along his career has allowed him to gain a deep understanding about the power of open source as an instrument for driving the definition of open standards as well as the implications/challenges of creating an open source community.