Red Hat Names Harold Covert Chief Financial Officer

Red Hat, Inc. (Nasdaq: RHAT), the market leader in open source solutions, announced today the appointment of Harold Covert to the position of Chief Financial Officer (CFO). Covert, age 53, joins Red Hat from Adobe Systems, Inc. based in San Jose, California, where he was Executive Vice President and CFO. Covert brings to Red Hat more than twenty years of experience in strategic management, finance operations and information systems.

Covert comes to Red Hat with a proven record of scaling global businesses and excellent operations and financial skills. While at Adobe, Covert had worldwide responsibility for Adobe's finance, planning, information systems, manufacturing, and accounting operations. In addition, Covert has had direct responsibility for mergers and acquisitions, raising capital in public and private equity and debt offerings, and SEC reporting.

Prior to his role at Adobe, Covert held CFO positions with a $1.5 billion division of Philips Electronics; as well as ISC Systems, Inc. A graduate of Lake Erie College and Cleveland State University, Covert is a Certified Public Accountant and veteran of the U.S. Army.

"Hal's global experience with scaling the financial and operation strategies of publicly traded companies is a tremendous asset to our team," said Matthew Szulik, president and CEO of Red Hat, Inc. "His strategic advice and insight will be invaluable in helping Red Hat grow its global leadership position in the open source technology industry."

"Red Hat is a world leader in developing and expanding open source, which is the most important new way of developing and supporting software," said Covert. "I'm looking forward to helping Red Hat continue to drive the acceptance of open source through strong financial management, and strategic mergers and acquisitions. Red Hat is not just a company, it's a top-tier organization that's on a mission to bring better software to more users, more quickly and efficiently than ever before."

About Red Hat, Inc.

Red Hat, the world's leading open source and Linux provider, is headquartered in Raleigh, NC with satellite offices spanning the globe. The most trusted name in open source, CIOs and other senior-level IT executives have ranked Red Hat as the industry's most valued vendor for two consecutive years in the CIO Insight Magazine Vendor Value study. Red Hat is leading Linux and open source solutions into the mainstream by making high quality, low cost technology accessible. Red Hat provides operating system software along with middleware, applications and management solutions. Red Hat also offers support, training and consulting services to its customers worldwide and through top-tier partnerships. Red Hat's open source strategy offers customers a long term plan for building infrastructures that are based on and leverage open source technologies with focus on security and ease of management. Learn more: http://www.redhat.com

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