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Awards

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2011 Red Hat Certified Professional of the Year Finalists

Red Hat is pleased to announce the 2011 Red Hat Certified Professional of the Year contest finalists from the four regions (North America, EMEA, LATAM, APAC). Red Hat's annual Red Hat Certified Professional of the Year contest is a celebration of the hard work, expertise, and ingenuity of some of the world's premier IT professionals.

Important Dates:

Submissions Open: February 2
Submissions Close: March 4
Judging Takes Place: March 4-11, 2011
Four Regional Finalists Announced: April 4, 2011
Finalist Voting Opens: April 4, 2011
Finalist Voting Closes: April 15, 2011
Red Hat Certified Professional of the Year Announced: TBD

The overall Red Hat Certified Professional of the Year, as determined by the highest-earning submission via the online voting, will receive a free Red Hat Summit and JBoss World conference pass, airfare, and a hotel stay for 3 nights for either the 2011 or 2012 Red Hat Summit / JBoss World, a 2011 Red Hat Certified Professional of the Year plaque, and will be honored at the Red Hat Summit Awards Reception.

The 2011 Red Hat Certified Professionals of the Year Finalists:

LATAM Finalist

Jorge Juarez, Manager, Banco Azteca

Red Hat Certified System Administrator (RHCSA)

Juarez first introduced Linux and open source into Banco Aztecas IT environment. As an IT manager, Juarez has implemented Red Hat Enterprise Linux to reduce costs while improving performance and productivity. Mr. Juarez earned his Red Hat Certified System Administrator certification to provide him the confidence and skills to continue migrating servers and applications mounted on proprietary Unix systems to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

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

EMEA Finalist

Peter Robinson, Infrastructure Engineer, NTT Europe

Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE)

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

Mr. Robinson is currently a Core Infrastructure Engineer working for NTT Europe, an enterprise hosting company designing and supporting a number of large complex RHEL solutions covering businesses from government, financial services, airline, sporting institutions and SME. NTT Europe hosts numerous RHEL servers across a number of data centers primarily in Europe. Mr. Robinson is involved in the design and management of the companys Red Hat management infrastructure, as well as designing automatic deployment systems for the quick deployment of RHEL 6, 5 and 4 servers, the architecture of RHEL 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, Mr. 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 OLPC Sugar on a Stick. Mr. Robinson contributes extensively to the One Laptop Per Child and SugarLabs communities to help promote and move forward 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. Mr. Robinson has been to four Fedora User and Developer conferences (FUDCon) to contribute and discuss the future of both Fedora and EPEL, and is an active contributor to other upstream open source projects.

North America Finalist

Quint Van Deman, Director, Emergent, LLC

Red Hat Certified Architect (RHCA)

As the Director of Open Source Consulting at Emergent LLC, Quint Van Demans 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 Red Hat Certified Architect 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 Emergents 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.

For members of the IT staff, especially if they've taken a Red Hat Certification Exam, they understand the level of technical aptitude required to pass the five practical exams across such a wide technological spectrum.

Mr. Van Demans journey towards becoming an Red Hat Certified Architect began in 2002 when he first earned Red Hat Certified Engineer on Red Hat Enterprise Linux v3, and re-certified on RHEL5. As a RHCE, Mr. 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. Mr. Van Deman started in March of 2008, and finished earlier this year, averaging one course every six months. Mr. Van Demans 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 Finalist

Vineet Kumar, System Administrator, Hertz Australia

Red Hat Certified System Administrator (RHCSA)

After earning his Red Hat Certified System Administrator (RHCSA) certification, Mr. Kumar has upgraded Hertzs 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 Mr. Kumars skills confirmed by his RHCSA, managing 100% server up-time and maintaining Hertzs Linux systems has become a reality.

Mr. 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, Mr. Kumar has fine-tuned Hertzs SElinux policies to instill the utmost security for the company. Mr. Kumar is looking forward to earning his Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) certification, and evaluating Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization as a virtualization solution to save costs on running and maintaining physical servers.