RALEIGH, N.C.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the award-winning finalists in its third annual Red Hat and JBoss Innovation Awards. The awards are designed to recognize the outstanding use, innovation and extension of Red Hat and JBoss solutions by Red Hat customers, partners and the open source community. From the finalists, one Red Hat Innovator of the Year and one JBoss Innovator of the Year will each be selected and announced during the Red Hat Summit and JBoss World, co-located this year in Chicago, Sept. 1-4, 2009.

There are five categories recognizing winning submissions and one category that recognizes a winner who is deploying both Red Hat and JBoss solutions. Red Hat Innovation Awards category winners will be provided with complimentary admission to the 2009 Red Hat Summit and JBoss World, where each will be recognized through an awards ceremony in a general session for both Red Hat Summit and JBoss World attendees.

From the category winners, an overall Red Hat Innovator of the Year and a JBoss Innovator of the Year will each be selected by the community through online voting and announced at a special awards ceremony on September 4.

The 2009 Red Hat and JBoss Innovation Awards winners include:

Management Excellence:

• Red Hat: Whole Foods Market

Whole Foods Market, www.wholefoodsmarket.com, a leader in the U.S. natural and organic foods industry and America's first national certified organic grocer has more than 275 stores, nine distribution centers, and more than 54,000 team members in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. The company was selected for its use of Red Hat Satellite to manage its Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems that resulted in reduced costs, reallocated resources and the ability of the Whole Foods IT department to focus on strategic business initiatives.

• JBoss: American Family Insurance

American Family Insurance, www.amfam.com, is the nation's third-largest mutual property and casualty insurer and the 14th-largest property and casualty insurance company with more than $4.1 billion in policyholder equity, and a network of 4,000 agents who serve 19 states. American Family Insurance is migrating to JBoss Enterprise Application Platform from WebSphere, and was selected for its use of JBoss Operations Network to manage its servers and its close work with the JBoss engineering team that plans to provide benefits to the open source community and commercial enterprises looking at JBoss ON.

Optimized Systems:

• Red Hat: Verizon

Verizon Communications Inc., www.verizon.com, a Dow 30 company, is a global leader in delivering broadband and other wireless and wireline communications services to mass market, business, government and wholesale customers. Building out the nation's most advanced all-digital, fiber-optic network straight to customers' homes and businesses, Verizon was selected for its consolidation and standardization on Red Hat Enterprise Linux for its SAP and PeopleSoft Enterprise Resource Planning applications to reduce costs, increase performance, and allow the ability to scale for growth. With Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the company now runs its servers more efficiently, with minimal need for additional equipment, bolstering Verizon's extensive energy conservation efforts.

• JBoss: Harvard Business Publishing + Rivet Logic

Harvard Business Publishing (HBP), www.harvardbusiness.org, is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Harvard University, providing a wide range of publications - both print and online - that target academic, enterprise and individual manager markets. Rivet Logic, www.rivetlogic.com, is a consulting and systems integration firm that provides professional open source services and solutions for organizations such as HBP. Rivet Logic and HBP were selected for the innovative use of open source solutions from Red Hat, JBoss, and Alfresco at HBP, that have enabled increased stability and the ability to develop products faster, bundle existing products more efficiently, and generate new revenue opportunities by increasing site traffic and offering richer, fresher, and more varied content.

Superior Alternatives:

• Red Hat: Union Bank, N.A.

Union Bank, N.A., www.unionbank.com, has 335 branch offices in California, Washington, and Oregon; two international offices; and facilities in six other states. It is the 16^th largest bank in the U.S. based on assets at March 31, 2009. Union Bank was selected for its operating platform migration from AIX to Red Hat Enterprise Linux and its Websphere to JBoss migration to support its mission critical applications at an improved price, greater performance and less up-keep. Union Bank used open source solutions to increase time to market, reliability and return on investment.

• JBoss: GEICO

GEICO (Government Employees Insurance Company), www.geico.com, is the third-largest private passenger auto insurer in the United States. The company provides auto insurance coverage for more than 9 million policyholders. GEICO was selected for its evaluation and choice of JBoss Enterprise Application Platform to reduce total cost of ownership by more than 30 percent and overall resource utilization went from above 50 percent to under 10 percent, which allowed significant room for scalability without having to acquire additional hardware.

Carved Out Costs:

• JBoss: Allianz Australia Limited

Allianz Australia Limited, www.allianz.com.au, Australia's fourth largest general insurer with over two million policyholders, operates across Australia and New Zealand and offers a wide range of insurance and risk management products and services.

Extensive Ecosystem:

• Red Hat: Hilti Corporation

Hilti Corporation, www.hilti.com, a leading-edge technology provider to the global construction industry, with almost 20,000 employees in more than 120 countries around the world, offers products, systems and services to the global construction industry. Hilti was selected for its standardization of Red Hat Enterprise Linux to handle its SAP® applications, including SAP ERP and SAP Customer Relationship Management, with more than 5TB of data. Hilti migrated its critical systems from a Tru64 UNIX based system to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Cluster Suite and Red Hat Global File System (GFS). The migration to Red Hat solutions delivered increased application performance, reduced electricity costs and provided the company with a long-term platform strategy.

• JBoss: Optaros + Massachusetts Convention Center Authority

Optaros, www.optaros.com, is an open source consulting firm that specializes in the development of custom applications for clients through the Assembled Web. The Massachusetts Convention Center Authority (MCCA), www.mccahome.com, owns and oversees the operation of four major facilities, including the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center (BCEC). According to the MCCA, it has generated $2.3 billion in economic impact over the past five years in the greater Boston area and is the eighth busiest convention center in North America. Optaros and MCCA staff worked together to rebuild the MCCA's event management system. The product, known as ShowBiz, helps streamline the detailed process of setting up large-scale events, and is now completely run on an open source stack that was designed and assembled by Optaros. Approximately 90 percent of the MCCA's day-to-day operations now run on open source solutions from JBoss Enterprise Middleware.

Red Hat and JBoss: Outstanding Open Source Architecture:

• Ecommerce Inc. + Vizuri

Ecommerce, Inc., www.ecommerce.com, is a global web hosting and ecommerce services provider with a sound customer base of several hundred thousand individuals and businesses from around the globe, and currently hosts more than half a million domains on its infrastructure. Vizuri, www.vizuri.com, is a Red Hat Advanced Business Partner and Preferred JBoss Certified Systems Integrator committed to delivering innovation by utilizing open source solutions to provide cost-effective, enterprise solutions. Ecommerce and Vizuri were selected for their work in developing Imperia, an Intelligent Data Center web services hosting platform that aims to increase customer service, reduce customer turnover, reduce operational costs, and increase customer reliability using Red Hat, JBoss, Hyperic and EnterpriseDB solutions. Ecommerce chose Vizuri to develop the project because of its excellent track record with Red Hat based open source solutions and strong placement within the industry.

"The submissions are more impressive each year as nominees creatively utilize Red Hat and JBoss solutions to solve problems and achieve significant results such as increased performance, cost savings and enhanced service, among others," said Lee Congdon, CIO at Red Hat and a 2009 Red Hat Innovation Awards judge. "It's exciting to see how partners, customers and the community are leveraging the full advantage of the open source development model to overcome challenges and create value."

For more information on the Red Hat Innovation Awards, or to read the winning submissions and vote for the Innovator of the Year, please visit http://www.redhat.com/promo/summit/2009/awards/.

For more information about Red Hat, please visit www.redhat.com. For more news, more often, visit press.redhat.com.

About Red Hat, Inc.

Red Hat, the world's leading open source solutions provider, is headquartered in Raleigh, NC with over 65 offices spanning the globe. CIOs ranked Red Hat as one of the top vendors delivering value in Enterprise Software for five consecutive years in the CIO Insight Magazine Vendor Value survey. Red Hat provides high-quality, affordable technology with its operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, together with applications, management and Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) solutions, including JBoss Enterprise Middleware. Red Hat also offers support, training and consulting services to its customers worldwide. Learn more: http://www.redhat.com.

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Red Hat

Kara Schiltz, 919-301-3002

kschiltz@redhat.com

Source: Red Hat, Inc.