Red Hat Taps Tru64 Unix Expert as CTO

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Linux distributor Red Hat said this week that it has hired a new chief technology officer, one with deep Linux and Unix credentials. Brian Stevens, who has been hacking operating systems professionally for 20 years, is the new CTO and vice president of engineering at Red Hat. Prior to his appointment, Stevens was the CTO at Mission Critical Linux, a startup that tried to create a hardened Linux variant that was created by a bunch of former Compaq/Digital techies.

Stevens, in fact, was one of those techies, and he was one of the key forces behind Mission Critical Linux's creation of a turnkey clustered environment for Linux back in the early 2000s. The Lowell, Mass., company launched in 1999 and received $20 million in venture capital from General Atlantic Partners (the same venture capitalists who control ERP software juggernaut SSA Global) in mid-2000. By early 2002, with the dot-com bust in full downward swing and the IT economy collapsing, Mission Critical Linux laid off the majority of its employees and neither the company nor its Convolo product was not heard from again. Stevens was not the original CTO of the company, but eventually rose to that position as the company grew. But he certainly has a strong technical resume based on his work at the former Compaq and Digital, where Stevens was one of the main architects of the Tru64 Unix operating system for Digital's VAX and Alpha lines of servers. Stevens was a senior member of the Digital and then Compaq technical staff for 14 years and was the developer of the first commercial X Window system (part of "Project Athena," a distributed desktop computing environment created by Digital, IBM, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that was launched in 1983). Project Athena is where X Window, instant messaging, and Kerberos security were invented. Yes, this is serious stuff.

Stevens was also the technical lead and main architect of the TruCluster clustering product for Digital Unix, which was renamed to Tru64 Unix in the 1990s. The VAX platform and its VMS proprietary operating system had--and arguably still has--the best system clustering technologies in the world, and it was Stevens' job to port that code to Digital's Unix--not an easy task. You can see now why he worked at Mission Critical Linux. Red Hat has a strong Linux clustering background, having paid $674 million in stock in November 1999 to acquire Cygnus Solutions, the company that was the main rival to Mission Critical Linux and probably the main reason that the latter company had such a hard time.

For a while, Michael Tiemann, who was CTO and co-founder of Cygnus Solutions, took over that role at Red Hat, replacing Marc Ewing, who created his own version of Linux in 1994 and eventually sold that company to Bob Young, Red Hat's first chairman and CEO, back in 1995. Tiemann eventually became vice president of open source affairs at Red Hat and is now also president of the Open Source Initiative, one the many (some might say too many) steering bodies that have a say in how open source software is evolving.

Paul Cormier, executive vice president of engineering at Red Hat since May 2001, continues in that role and he is technically Stevens' new boss. Cormier was head of research and development at security compliance software maker BindView Development, which was just eaten by Symantec last week. Cormier has a masters of science degree in software development from the Rochester Institute of Technology; Stevens got his masters of science degree in computer systems from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. They are arguably the two best computer science schools in New York, and indeed, are among the best in the country.

So now Red Hat has clustering software, a global file system, a lot of smart techies. It will be interesting to see what Cormier and Stevens cook up. Something that looks a lot like VMScluster and TruCluster, we can hope.