Google Hires Former Red Hat CTO Stevens As VP Of Cloud Platforms

Brian Stevens, the former Red Hat CTO who abruptly resigned last month after nearly 13 years at the open source vendor, has a new job at Google.

Stevens joined Google this month as vice president of cloud platforms, according to his LinkedIn profile. ZDNet was first to report on Google’s hiring of Stevens Tuesday.

Google spokespeople weren’t immediately available for comment on Stevens’ hiring or to provide information about the role he’ll be playing at the Mountain View, Calif.-based vendor.

[Related: Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens Resigns After Nearly 13 Years]

At Red Hat, Stevens was in charge of engineering for Linux, server virtualization, management, cloud and JBOSS middleware products. He’s also a member of the OpenStack Foundation and helped lead the vendor’s push to embrace OpenStack and Linux containers.

Stevens’ background is a good fit for Google because its cloud IaaS supports Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, as well as other Linux distributions like CoreOS, Debian and CentOS, according to ZDNet.

Google, like Red Hat, also has big plans for Linux containers. In July, it open-sourced Kubernetes, a management tool for Docker containers that is supported by Red Hat, Microsoft, IBM and others.

While Google is a latecomer to the cloud market, it’s expected to have plenty of impact on its future direction, and the highly regarded Stevens will presumably be playing a major role in what’s coming next.

Google is locked in a price war with Microsoft and Amazon Web Services in the cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service space and also sells Platform-as-a-Service. Its Cloud Platform portfolio also includes object storage, database, big data and other services.

Google in recent years has hired several high profile enterprise sales and business development experts from Oracle, Salesforce.com, Microsoft and other vendors in order to boost sales of its products to large businesses.

Google last week shed "enterprise" from its product portfolio in favor of Google For Work, a moniker it believes is better suited to the reality of how customers are using its products.

PUBLISHED SEPT. 9, 2014