Michael Ferris

Michael Ferris is Senior Vice President of Corporate Development and Strategy at Red Hat. In this role, he is focused on building the company’s global business strategy across all offerings and services, mergers and acquisitions, and market-making partnerships.

Throughout his 20+ years at Red Hat, Ferris has focused on the value of the company’s business model. He served as the first product manager for Red Hat® Enterprise Linux®, and he later led the evolution of Red Hat’s subscriptions from capacity to consumption models. This allowed for Red Hat products on public cloud providers and led to the creation of the Red Hat Certified Cloud and Service Provider Program, which includes 1,000+ Red Hat partners and lets customers use multi- and hybrid-cloud paradigms across the entire Red Hat portfolio.

Ferris has also worked to define the company’s business architecture, leading strategy and business negotiations on high-profile partnerships as well. These efforts have enabled Red Hat to combine the open source development model with its value propositions and various subscription models to meet changing market needs.

Ferris is either the sole or a teamed inventor of more than 85 issued U.S. patents in the space of cloud computing, all of which are covered under Red Hat's patent promise in support and defense of open source development.