MySQL CEO Marten Mickos has spoken before about how he is more interested in learning from the successes of Ikea, Ryanair and Virgin Mobile than he is the established proprietary software vendors. Even so, it was surprising to see that Red Hat has looked outside the software industry for its new president and CEO.

Jim Whitehurst was most recently chief operating officer at Delta, where he had responsibility for operations, sales and customer service, network and revenue management, marketing and corporate strategy. No doubt Whitehurst has all the credentials necessary to drive Red Hat forward, and departing CEO Matthew Szulik maintained that he also has open source credentials as a user of both Fedora Core and Slackware.

While some people have doubted the wisdom of Red Hat bringing in an executive from outside the software industry, Szulik explained that it was important from his perspective that the new CEO should be “unencumbered from a historical perspective”. Meanwhile Larry Dignan reminds us that Lou Gerstner’s job before IBM was CEO of RJR Nabisco.

Szulik also described how Whitehurst played an important role in restructuring at Delta and improving customer service, as well as the creation of Orbitz, which was originally created by Delta with Continental, Northwest and United (and incidentally, runs on Red Hat).

Szulik will remain Red Hat chairman but has stepped down as president and CEO due to what he described as serious health issues within his family. It should go without saying that everyone wishes him well in that regard.

As well as going out on high in terms of the company’s financial results, Szulik also left a parting message that should serve as a reminder why it is important that the company continue to be different, and how fitting it is that the company has looked outside the software industry for its new CEO.

Another post over at the Truth Happens blog also puts some perspective on the importance of being different.

“My first week at Red Hat, freshly hired as a writer in the Brand Communications department, Matthew Szulik passed along to my group a Kurt Vonnegut short story, Harrison Bergeron, as inspiration/fodder for a video we were trying to make. A few days later, it was suggested that Matthew had said in passing that it didn’t have to be a video, it could be a very short one-act play, if that was a better way to tell the story we were trying to tell.”