"Brian's vision and experience make him the right person to lead Emerging Technologies as our CTO," said Paul Cormier (pictured), EVP of Engineering at Red Hat, as it was announced that Brian Stevens from today is Red Hat's new CTO.

"He's pioneered new technologies that have contributed to the rise of Linux as an industry-standard operating platform," continued Cormier. "Brian's enterprise experience both before, and with Red Hat has been instrumental to our continued success in building out the Open Source Architecture," he added.

Stevens's new title in full is Chief Technology Officer and Vice President of Engineering.

Formerly the company's vice president of Operating System, Storage and Clustering Development, he has spent the past four years leading Red Hat's enterprise strategy. He brings 20 years of enterprise engineering, including experience as the former CTO of Mission Critical Linux, where he was responsible for corporate strategy, business development, virtualization and the clustering product line. As CTO, Stevens will focus on technology strategy and lead Red Hat's Emerging Technologies group. This team will define and leverage open source projects and technologies that will bring further value to the Linux platform.

Prior to his position as CTO at Mission Critical Linux, Stevens spent 14-years at Digital/Compaq as a senior member of the technical staff, where he was an architect of the Tru64 Operating System and clustering products. Moreover, Stevens was a developer of the first commercial release of X Window System, as part of Project Athena, a joint venture of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Digital Equipment Corporation. He served as the technical lead and architect for the inaugural release of Digital's TruCluster product, which remains the industry's benchmark for clustered computing. Stevens also holds a US patent on secure methods of accessing computers through a firewall.