Dear Red Hat,

Yesterday, you joined IBM. And I’ll be the first to say, I absolutely didn’t see it coming.

We met around five years ago when I was an intern for you in Boston. And since then, we’ve been on quite the ride. But I think I can sum up everything you taught me in three words:

I don’t know

Please, allow me to explain.

2 Years After We Met...

I was working for you as a Software Consultant. Our customer was one of the largest telecommunications companies in the world. And we were two weeks from production with one of their critical applications.

But as soon as the application received traffic, customers would experience slowness and then eventually it would stall completely.

It was a disaster.

On a call with a few executives, one of our senior consultants explained what we’d done and how we were working on it. And one executive replied:

“So…we need this in production in two weeks. Do we know what the problem is?”

Now, here’s where a regular consultant would conceal as much information as possible — especially if they could be at fault. Or they deflect blame. Or try to confuse people with technical jargon. You know, face-saving maneuvers.

But what he said next totally baffled me.

“As of right now, I don’t know what the problem is”

It got quiet.

“…but we’ll to work with our community, support team, and engineers to do everything we can to fix this before your production date”

The execs didn’t applaud his answer. And I’m sure they were still uneasy. But they knew it was the truth — an anomaly in the consulting world.

And so, we continued to work. We shared everything. Our engineers shared every piece of relevant code. Our support team shared any case similar to the one we were solving. Even the community shared some insights.

And in turn, our customer’s employees shared everything they knew as well.

Even when it seemed like our product could be at fault, we continued to be open about potential flaws.

Trust Grows

3 days and many many support calls later, we pinpointed the problem and created a fix.

The day was saved.

But a weird thing happened after the dust settled. Our consulting team started getting more questions than before. We received more requests for product demos & presentations. And they started coming to us more for advice than just to put out fires.

It seemed that our customer actually trusted us more than before

And that happened because we were willing to be open. We were willing to share all our knowledge so that we could work better together. We were willing to say “I don’t know” when we didn’t know.

After that project, I started being more open with other clients too. That’s what you taught me.

Open For Good

Now, being “open” is NOT why I came to you. But it is why I stayed. You always focused on working WITH people. You tried to help people understand technology instead of just squeezing money out of them. That’s pretty different than many companies. And many times, that meant you taking a pay cut.

But it’s what you believed.

Because let’s be honest, you don’t really have much intellectual property.

What you have is your good name. And like the name of a good friend, that is your true worth.

It’s not just your Fedoras.

Your employees trust you. The open source community trusts you. Your customers trust you.

Even I trust you. Well, as much as one can trust a company.

But I know it’s just business. So I have no hard feelings. Besides, if all goes well, IBM will give you the scale you need to reach the world.

I just hope you won’t lose what makes you special. Regardless, I’m so very grateful to work for you.

Stay well,

-T.O.