Red Hat Hires Away VMware Exec To Manage Strategic Alliances

Scott Musson, previously senior director of global strategic alliances at VMware, will take over the same duties at Red Hat, only with a vice president title. He will be responsible for managing Red Hat's relationships with major system vendors including Cisco, Dell, Hewlett-Packard and IBM, which all sell servers that run on Red Hat's distribution of the Linux operating system.

While Linux remains Red Hat's flagship product, the company has been expanding into virtualization and cloud software and has become one of VMware's chief competitors.

[Related: Red Hat CEO: We've Entered A New Era Of Collaborative Innovation ]

Musson worked at VMware for more than 7 years. Before that his career included positions at Hewlett-Packard, Compaq, Dell and NCR.

Red Hat said Musson and his team would work to develop joint business plans with partners and "develop assets around Red Hat technologies."

VMware has seen a number of executive departures in recent months, including channel chief Scott Aronson who left earlier this year to become vice president of partner sales at a cloud management startup.

Other recent VMware executive departures include channel executive Doug Smith, cloud and application services vice president Jerry Chen, and application platform group executive Tod Nielsen.

PUBLISHED JULY 8, 2013