Red Hat and JBoss Innovators of the Year 2009

At last week’s co-located Red Hat Summit and JBoss World, I had the opportunity to present our 2009 Innovator of the Year Awards. The awards ceremony is one of my favorite parts of Red Hat Summit and JBoss World, and recognizing and honoring our customers is a great way to close out a busy week of learning and networking. In its third year, the Innovation Awards highlight organizations with compelling stories about how they’ve put Red Hat and JBoss products and technologies to use in their IT environments.

The six category finalists for 2009 included:

Management Excellence
Red Hat: Whole Foods Market
JBoss: American Family Insurance

Optimized Systems
Red Hat: Verizon Communications Inc.
JBoss: Harvard Business Publishing + Rivet Logic

Superior Alternatives
Red Hat: Union Bank, N.A.
JBoss: GEICO

Carved Out Costs
Red Hat: Discount Tire Company
JBoss: Allianz Australia Ltd

Extensive Ecosystem
Red Hat: Hilti Corporation
JBoss: Optaros + Massachusetts Convention Center Authority

Red Hat and JBoss: Outstanding Open Source Architecture
Ecommerce Inc. + Vizuri

Voting was open to the entire open source and Red Hat community to select the two overall Innovation Award winners – one Red Hat and one JBoss winner. I am pleased to announce that this year’s Red Hat Innovator of the Year Award went to Whole Foods Market. 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.

The JBoss Innovator of the Year went to Ecommerce + Vizuri 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 impressive effort and time put forth by these organizations speaks to the true impact of open source. I encourage all of you to read their full submissions and case studies to learn more about their amazing work with Red Hat and JBoss solutions.