Intelligent CIO Europe Issue 10 | Page 101

GET TO KNOW... On the lighter side of things, we ask the industry experts what makes them tick. . . . Mike Kelly, Chief Information Officer, Red Hat What first made you think of a career in technology? What do you think will emerge as the technology trend of 2018 and why? I started my career in accounting. After I experienced the systems I had to use to do my job, I knew that my work would be better served on systems than accounting. My dad also spent a career in IT, so we always had computers and discussions around their potential. I remember going to his office and watching punch cards flying around. I learned to program BASIC on a TI-994a and we would spend time together putting in programs from Compute! Magazine. We are in a new frontier of how enterprise IT can enable businesses to move forward. There are a plethora of new tools, services and solutions to be leveraged. Looking at 2018, open hybrid and multi-cloud will be seen as the biggest trend of this year. Our What style of management philosophy do you employ with your current position? I’m a firm believer that leaders need to grant autonomy to members of their teams. To me, that lays the foundation of trust and hopefully inspires people to do their best work. At Red Hat, we have a very open, collaborative process where we engage everybody in our planning and our execution process. When I first came on board, we had an open forum to solicit feedback on our direction and we came up with a purpose and landed on what our strategic areas of focus were. We believe that if people are brought into the vision, they’ll stay. It’s about feeling attracted and contributing to the mission, that’s our biggest retention strategy. www.intelligentcio.com “ company’s core strategy is to embrace the open hybrid cloud. We believe IT organisations are going to operate over four footprints: on-premises bare metal, on- premises virtualised, private cloud and public cloud. We don’t believe that a company is going to make a large-scale binary shift from on-premises to the public cloud; we don’t believe that’s going to be the lion’s share. OPEN HYBRID AND MULTI- CLOUD WILL BE SEEN AS THE BIGGEST TREND OF THIS YEAR. OUR COMPANY’S CORE STRATEGY IS TO EMBRACE THE OPEN HYBRID CLOUD. INTELLIGENTCIO 101