Who says you can’t go home again? Former Red Hat executive Tim Yeaton has rejoined the company after several years away. The former senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing and general manager of Enterprise Solutions has taken on the newly created role of senior vice president of Red Hat’s new Infrastructure Group, where he will be responsible for driving the vendor’s infrastructure and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) business.

Prior to rejoining Red Hat, Yeaton was the CEO of Black Duck Software, a software development company focused on enabling enterprise adoption of open source software. So returning to Red Hat is an understandable move for Yeaton.

In addition to driving infrastructure and IaaS solutions, Yeaton will be responsible for the platform, virtualization and OpenStack businesses, as well as Red Hat’s cloud management product line. That puts him in a critical role for Red Hat’s overall cloud business.

Yeaton is an industry veteran with more than 30 years of experience at companies that also include EqualLogic, Dell, Avaki, Macromedia, Compaq and Digital Equipment Corp.

With a long history in the open source space, Yeaton was named one of the most influential people in the open source software industry in a 2009 survey by Mindtouch.

The appointment of Yeaton also means a realignment of Red Hat’s its products and technologies organization to drive the vendor’s interests in next-generation infrastructure, IaaS and developer offerings.

“Most of the innovation happening in cloud infrastructure, as well as in cloud enablement such as Big Data, mobility, cloud management, etc., is being catalyzed by open source technologies and community-driven development,” Yeaton said in a prepared statement. “Red Hat has an incredible opportunity to lead these shifts in IT, and its open hybrid cloud vision resonates strongly with many enterprise IT customers I’ve worked with over the last five years while at Black Duck.”