CDN has learned from two sources that Luc Villeneuve will become the new president of Red Hat Canada.
The start date for Villeneuve is Dec. 2nd, according to the two sources.
Villeneuve replaces Christine Steger, who left the Linux pioneer earlier this year. Steger is now the regional director for Sitecore Canada, a software development vendor for marketing based in Toronto.
Villeneuve was the president of McAfee Canada starting in mid-2012. McAfee recently eliminated the Canadian president’s position during organizational changes that also impacted other areas of the company. Brian Gumbel, the vice-president of McAfee Americas East, now has responsibility for Canada. Gumbel was the long serving vice-president of McAfee’s Northeast region.
Villeneuve returned to the Canadian market for family reasons after a stint as president of NCR Europe based in Paris. Villeneuve was the NCR Canada president for many years. Villeneuve is a channel veteran who has held other senior executive positions with Sun Microsystems Canada and GE Capital. While at NCR Canada, Villeneuve made growing the NCR’s indirect channel a priority and grew that business to from very little to more than 15 per cent of NCR’s overall revenue.
At McAfee Villeneuve made strides to improve the channel coverage throughout Canada. He also improved McAfee’s presence in the commercial, SMB and consumer markets.
Villeneuve enters Red Hat Canada at a critical time in its history. The company has vastly expanded its product portfolio mostly through the acquisitions of Gluster, FuseSource, Polymita and ManageIQ.
This has enabled Red Hat to offer more than Enterprise Linux and JBoss middleware. The company now has solutions for cloud platform-as-a-service with its OpenShift offering and CloudForms which manages virtual, private, and hybrid cloud infrastructures.
Red Hat’s go-to-market strategy as an open source vendor also differs from traditional software vendors who sell licenses and maintenance. Red Hat sells subscriptions instead, where a customer gets support and integration services. The customer only pays the set price for the subscription and gets unlimited access in a stream that help customers in using open-source software. Customers pay one set price for unlimited access to the product and services; even training in some cases.