Competitors should keep a wary eye on newly minted Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst, whose fresh face masks a certified executioner who has a plan to grow the open source leader into a billion-dollar juggernaut supplying data center infrastructure software.

The 40-year-old Whitehurst left his position as COO of Delta Airlines to replace Matt Szulik on Jan. 1, and brings with him a business savvy he intends to soak into the corporate culture of Red Hat.

He's already tagged Microsoft as bloated software that locks in CIOs while actively spinning Red Hat's story around middleware, virtualization and software-as-a-service.

Next week, he will take the stage at Red Hat's JBoss World for his first conference keynote address as CEO and first appearance in front of a large audience of customers and partners eager to hear where the company and its software are headed.

He doesn't plan to disappoint and the Harvard MBA's goals are lofty. He expects the open source vendor that had just less than $500 million in revenue last year to eventually strut into the billion-dollar range in the next three years.

Other goals that he thinks are achievable in a perfect world and in that timeframe include continued growth in server market share, establishing the company as the leader in supplying service-oriented architecture (SOA) and the clear application server front-runner, re-accelerating the company's growth rate and reestablishing its position as a large growth company.

"He's an operator," says Raven Zachary, an analyst with the 451 Group. "It's tough to run an airline. Even though there have been lots of critiques of the airlines, the reality is that he understands complex issues related to operations."

That knowledge is what Red Hat appears to need as it looks to evolve past its Linux operating system roots. The company is attempting to mix the Linux operating system, virtualization, middleware, independent software vendor (ISV) applications and software delivered as services into an enterprise data center platform.

"I think I bring a whole series of skills around execution to ensure that we really take Red Hat to the next level," Whitehurst says. "And I think that that is something that the board was looking for."

Zachary says it is wait-and-see time, but that Whitehurst certainly "has the background to take Red Hat to the next level."
Nearly a year ago, the company released Version 5 of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), but it was efforts to rationalize its 2006 acquisition of JBoss, join the virtualization craze, stave off attacks on its services and support crown jewel, and court Java developers where the company faced down new competitors such as IBM, Oracle/BEA and Sun. All of which lined up to take shots at the upstart.