Executive Spotlight Interview with Lynne Chamberlain, VP of Business Dev. for Red Hat – ExecutiveBiz (blog)

ExecutiveBiz: What does your role as the leader of business development for the public sector entail?

Lynne Chamberlain: Istarted with Red Hatthirteen years ago and moved to theNorth American Public Sector organization2 years later.

Red Hat has grown from $500M to $3B in revenues during this time and Paul Smiths Public Sector Organization has been a key contributor.

We started the Federal Business Development group to pursue government programs in the DOD, Intel, and Civilian Agencies. Today the organization captures both Federal and SLED programs, and supports our System Integrators through a premier partner program. The Business Development organization working with the top 20 System Integrators has successfully teamed to win major programs within Public Sector. Our continual growth of 30%+ YOY, through closing Open Source solutions that include: Linux, Cloud, Containers, Storage, middleware and management software.I have been fortunate to lead the BD organization to include 26 Capture/Alliance Managers, System Architects and BD Marketing.

ExecutiveBiz: Where do you see open-source software having the greatest impact in the public sector?

Lynne Chamberlain:Open Source softwares greatest impact is in the Cloud and Dev Ops market space.Our Cloud and middleware products provide technology leadership:

Partners, i.e., Amazon and Microsoft turn to Red Hat to secure their cloud platforms and provide customers software defined storage, and middleware.Cloud Forms from Red Hat provides a single pane of glass so customers can manage a hybrid infrastructure that allows customers to transform their environments to take advantage of the best architectures in the software industry.

Red Hat has seen significant growth in the Cyber security market.Our Open Source Linux software is the foundation for many Cyber companies to build their software stack. Companies like Forcepoint, Raytheon uses Red Hat to combat insider threat, and General Dynamics uses Red Hat for mission critical apps. Red Hat was pleased to be part of the CSRA winning team for DISAs MILCOULD.

ExecutiveBiz: You have led the growth of your division thirty percent year over year for the past twelve years. Could you tell our readers how you achieved that?

Lynne Chamberlain:When I came to Red Hat we were known as the Linux software company that provided free software or people thought. Our business model of selling subscriptions instead of perpetual licenses has proved to be the direction of the industry today.It was an easy transition for Red Hat under the Cloud model. About 95% of Public Sector customers use Red Hat Linux software over our competition.Clients use it not only for the security, but also as the building block for our other software. Through the years Red Hat has acquired state of the art software, i.e., middleware, management software, storage and made it OPEN and easy to use by the community.

As the government transforms from the old mainframe technology to the Cloud, it is important for them to find an architecture that allows compatibility to all technologies so organizations are not locked in to any one vendor.

Today, we have so many great solutions not just Linux. When you think of Red Hat, you dont think of just Linux anymore, but instead customers think of our complete stack of solutions and of all these capabilities.Our growth has on one hand been organic with the foundation being a secure OS that adheres to standards, compliance, is efficient and all at a huge cost savings to our partners and end user customers.Weve also grown through acquisitions weve acquired JBOSS, a middleware product, as well as our Cloud and Storage products.We have a whole robust open source software suite today and Gartner portrays this in their 4 Quadrant model.

ExecutiveBiz: How can the public and private sector work closer together to implement Open-source software?

Lynne Chamberlain:Many of the Federal Agencies have adopted Open Source through out their infrastructure.They view the private sector as experts and their choices in architectures and software as key indicators of the future direction of industry.Take the VA, and DHA; they have procured Open source solutions through Cerner and Optum.The SEC looks to Wall Street and their IT decisions. Both the NY Stock Exchange and the NASDAQ run on Red Hat Open Source software. The Department of Treasury looks to the Bank of America, Citibank, etc as to how they build their banking, trading, etc., solutions.They run many of their applications on Red Hat Open Source software.Law Enforcement is tightly connected between DOJ, FBI, and the Police Departments when researching finger print identification, retina scans, etc.The foundation for all this work is done on Red Hat Open Source.Red Hat has a large partner eco-system.The applications running on Red Hat range from Child Welfare, to Toll Authority, to Banking, to Healthcare, to Justice, etc.Red Hat cannot do this alone.Teaming with System Integrators, Value Added Partner, and Resellers, together make this happen.

ExecutiveBiz: What new market opportunities do you see on the horizon?

Lynne Chamberlain:The industry is our oyster. Open Source is the Industrys software technology of choice.The total package of software includes: security, compliance, a complete stack of products from the OS, Open Stack, Cloud, middleware, storage, etc.

We continue to transform ourselves in order to support our customers and partners.We not only sell software to the IT Folk within the Public Sector but we are strong in our capabilities within the mission critical applications and framework.

As Jim Cramer on MSNBC says, Red Hat is Red Hot!

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Executive Spotlight Interview with Lynne Chamberlain, VP of Business Dev. for Red Hat - ExecutiveBiz (blog)