p { margin-bottom: 0.08in; }a:link { } p { margin-bottom: 0.08in; }a:link { } Red Hat recognizes those individuals who have used their skills as Red Hat certification credential holders to drive results at their organization through its annual Red Hat Certified Professional of the Year awards. This year we received more than 600 nominations from Red Hat certified professionals across the globe. After an intense review process, a panel of judges has selected four regional finalists for Red Hat Certified Professional of the Year.

We’re pleased to announce the 2011 Red Hat Certified Professional of the Year regional finalists:

LATAM

Jorge Juarez, Manager, Banco Azteca

Red Hat Certified System Administrator (RHCSA™)

Juarez first introduced Linux and open source into Banco Azteca’s IT environment. As an IT manager, Juarez has implemented Red Hat Enterprise Linux to reduce costs while improving performance and productivity. He earned his RHCSA™ certification to provide him the confidence and skills to continue migrating servers and applications mounted on proprietary Unix systems to Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Juarez has migrated more than 200 servers to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and during the first half of this year, his team will migrate the two most critical database clusters of the bank to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. To take the next step in his career, Juarez plans to earn his Red Hat Certified Engineer® (RHCE®) certification.

EMEA

Peter Robinson, Infrastructure Engineer, NTT Europe

Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE®)

Robinson has used Red Hat Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora extensively for more than 14 years, and has re-certified as a RHCE® three times, passing his first RHCE® certification on Red Hat Linux 6.2, 10 years ago when it first became available in Australia.

Robinson is currently a Core Infrastructure Engineer working for NTT Europe, an enterprise hosting company designing and supporting a number of large complex Red Hat Enterprise Linux solutions covering businesses from government, financial services, airline, sporting institutions and SME. NTT Europe hosts numerous Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers across a number of data centers primarily in Europe. Robinson is involved in the design and management of the company’s Red Hat management infrastructure, as well as designing automatic deployment systems for the quick deployment of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, 5 and 4 servers, the architecture of Red Hat Enterprise Linux solutions, its integration into new and existing solutions, and involvement in advanced support issues with the designed solutions. The solutions deployed include using open source and other management solutions to enable constant and well documented deployment of systems to meet PCI and other security standards in a consistent and reproducible manner.

In addition to his enterprise responsibilities, Robinson is an active contributor in the Fedora community, including leading the Fedora Mini Special Interest Group for small devices, maintaining the Moblin/Meego Netbook interface, as well as co-maintenance of One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Sugar on a Stick. Robinson contributes extensively to the OLPC and SugarLabs communities to help promote and advance open source as a core part of education and learning environments for the developing and developed worlds, and he personally has contributed and maintains more than 100 packages in the Fedora and EPEL package repositories. Robinson has been to four Fedora User and Developer Conferences to contribute and discuss the future of both Fedora and EPEL, and is an active contributor to other upstream open source projects.

NORTH AMERICA

Quint Van Deman, Director, Emergent, LLC

Red Hat Certified Architect (RHCA®)

As the Director of Open Source Consulting at Emergent LLC, Quint Van Deman’s principal objective is to help clients move from a last-generation proprietary IT infrastructure to a next-generation architecture that embraces the synergy of open source, open standards, and cloud-based solutions. Being a RHCA®t enables his objective in two principal ways. First, the journey to becoming a RHCA® enhanced his knowledge of many of the enterprise solutions that specifically solve common IT-related business challenges. From using Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for on premise server and data center consolidation, to using Red Hat Directory Server as the cornerstone of an Identity Management solution, he is able to show how open source solves CIO-level problems. Secondly, being an RHCA gives him instant credibility with Emergent’s customers. For the executives, it gives them the assurance to trust him as their IT advisor, that his knowledge across the spectrum isn't smoke and mirrors, but is based on practical experience backed up with certified knowledge.

Van Deman’s journey toward becoming a RHCA® began in 2002 when he first earned RHCE® on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, and re-certified on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. As a RHCE®, Van Deman was already functioning in an enterprise architecture role, but when Red Hat announced the capstone RHCA® program, he knew that was the certification path to follow. Van Deman started in March of 2008, and finished earlier this year, averaging one course every six months. His Red Hat certified skills have greatly helped him deliver results to his customers by helping them to harness the innovative power of open source solutions, to his employer by accelerating business growth into open source market, and to him personally, by knowing that he has achieved a level of professional certification that's highly regarded across the industry.

APAC

Vineet Kumar, System Administrator, Hertz Australia

Red Hat Certified System Administrator (RHCSA™)

After earning his RHCSA™ certification, Kumar has upgraded Hertz’s Linux servers to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, and also setup a disaster recovery site in Sydney, which is continuously updated, and he setup a Red Hat cluster, to handle any potential hardware failure to backup servers. With Red Hat technical support, and Kumar’s skills confirmed by his RHCSA™, managing 100% server up-time and maintaining Hertz’s Linux systems has become a reality.

Kumar has also utilized his Red Hat training skills to set-up a Red Hat Satellite to establish kickstart, and uses it to build and configure servers in less than 10 minutes. With help of SElinux he no longer has to rely on third-party software for security, using his knowledge from Red Hat training, Kumar has fine-tuned Hertz’s SElinux policies to instill the utmost security for the company. Kumar is looking forward to earning his RHCE® certification, and evaluating Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization as a virtualization solution to save costs on running and maintaining physical servers.

 

We’re now asking all Red Hat certified professionals to participate in a vote to select one overall Red Hat Certified Professional of the Year winner from the four regional finalists. Voting is open through Friday, April 15, 2011. If you’re a Red Hat certification credential holder, please cast your vote here.

Red Hat will host the Red Hat Certified Professional of the Year winner at a special reception during the 2011 Red Hat Summit and JBoss World in Boston, May 3-6. Join as at the Red Hat Summit by registering here as we celebrate the achievements of all professionals holding Red Hat certifications.