Red Hat Announces Third Annual Innovation Awards

Awards to be presented at the 2009 Red Hat Summit and JBoss World

RALEIGH, NC - March 9, 2009 - Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the launch of its third annual Red Hat Innovation awards to be presented at the 2009 Red Hat Summit and JBoss World, co-located this year in Chicago Sept. 1-4, 2009.

The Innovation Awards were created to honor individuals and companies who have forged new ground to demonstrate innovative solutions through the use of Red Hat and JBoss products and technologies.

The 2009 Innovation Awards will consist of six categories including:
* Management Excellence: Recognition of the impressive use of management tools, including Red Hat Network and JBoss Operations Network, to drive down TCO and increase ROI.
* Optimized Solutions: Recognition of striking performance, scalability and/or usability enhancements delivered with open source solutions.
* Superior Alternatives: Recognition of the most successful migration from proprietary solutions to open source alternatives.
* Extensive Ecosystem: Recognition of the use of Red Hat or JBoss' expanding partner ecosystem to create innovative architectures based on open source solutions.
* Carved out Costs: Recognition of customers who have leveraged open source solutions to significantly cut costs and extract added value from existing systems.
* Outstanding Open Source Architecture: Recognition of the use of Red Hat, JBoss, and partner offerings to create innovative architectures based on open source solutions. (Both Red Hat Summit and JBoss World registrants may compete for this award)

Nominations for each Innovation Award category will be judged by a panel of representatives and industry leaders including: Lee Congdon, CIO of Red Hat; Craig Muzilla, vice president, Middleware Business for Red Hat; John R. Rymer from Forrester Research, Inc.; Dana Gardner, a principal analyst from Interarbor; Jay Lyman from The 451 Group; Steven Vaughan-Nichols, editor-in-chief of Practical Technology.

"Delivering creative technology innovations and solutions, especially given the economic climate today, is vital to an organization's growth and success," said Lee Congdon, CIO of Red Hat. "I'm looking forward to learning how our partners and customers have leveraged JBoss and Red Hat solutions to optimize their IT infrastructure and stay ahead of the curve."

The 2009 Innovation Awards will be presented during the co-located Red Hat Summit and JBoss World, and submissions will be accepted until May 31, 2009. Five categories will each recognize two winning submissions, one from Red Hat and one from JBoss, and the Outstanding Open Source Architecture category will recognize one winner who is deploying both Red Hat and JBoss solutions. From these category winners, a Red Hat Innovator of the Year and a JBoss Innovator of the Year will be selected by the community through online voting and announced at the awards ceremony.

For more information, or to submit a nomination for the 2009 Innovation Awards, please visit www.redhat.com/2009innovationawards.
For more information on the 2009 Red Hat Summit and JBoss world, visit either www.redhat.com/promo/summit/2009 or www.jbossworld.com .

Source: Red Hat