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Awards

2012 Red Hat Certified Professional of the Year

Winners announced

Thank you to all Red Hat Certified Professionals (RHCPs) worldwide who submitted their story to become the Red Hat Certified Professional of the Year for 2012. We've received many outstanding stories.

The following are the winners for 2012. Congratulations to them all and to all RHCPs who use their Red Hat certified skills to enhance their IT environments.

Worldwide RHCP of the Year 2012

Sean Millichamp

I have been deploying Red Hat-based systems into production customer environments for 14 years. My first encounter with Linux was Yggdrasil LGX in 1993. However, it wasn't until I encountered Red Hat Linux 4 in 1997 that I believed I'd found a distribution professional and well-designed enough to use for a customer's critical business needs. In 1998 I deployed Red Hat Linux 4.2 to a customer with great success. Our customer was so happy with its performance, flexibility, and value that I developed a product offering and deployed many similar systems. Thus my focus and love of Linux was born.

Since then, I have deployed RHL and RHEL in countless different configurations and roles for a number of different companies. I have contributed bug reports and feature requests, often with minor patches, for documentation and code. Some of the projects include Red Hat Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, ldirectord, Cobbler, Augeas, and Puppet. I have presented at LUGs and the 2011 Red Hat Summit.

In 2007 my employer was struggling with a Red Hat Cluster Suite deployment and scheduled me for training in Red Hat's Enterprise Storage Management course. That course taught me the cluster suite's workings and best deployment practices. I completed the course with a perfect score on the exam and returned to work confident that we had been configuring the cluster correctly and the issues we were experiencing were due to poor network switch multicast support. I directed a replacement of our cluster switches with another brand which stabilized the cluster suite and got the project back on track.

I found myself looking for a new job in 2009. My significant experience with Linux, specifically my cluster suite experience and Certificate of Expertise, distinguished both me and my resume from others in consideration. Today, I am Senior Linux Architect for Secure-24, a managed hosting and cloud provider and Red Hat Hosting Partner in the Detroit, Michigan area.

As Senior Linux Architect, I am charged with setting the technical standards and direction of our Red Hat Enterprise Linux environment powering our customers' critical business systems, such as JBoss, SAP, and Oracle database platforms. Our customers include industries ranging from banking to manufacturing to pharmaceuticals. During customer tours our sales team often introduces me and highlights that I am an RHCE, a great "selling point" to our customers.

My job responsibilities include interviewing and working with our recruiting department to ensure we find the best Linux candidates, preferably those with Red Hat certifications. The hands-on nature and quality of material covered on Red Hat exams ensures that candidates possessing a Red Hat certification have a predictable and strong baseline of knowledge. When we interview a candidate with an RHCE they always do well on our technical interview. RHCE is such an important certification that I have worked towards creating the standard that Linux engineers on our staff should possess an RHCSA or RHCE, going so far as to facilitate study sessions with coworkers to help them obtain their certification.

Regional Winners for 2012

Bruno Lima

Innovation can be confused with creativity. We must unite the productive reasoning and innovative action that result in competitive advantage. Therefore, I chose to use open-source technologies, especially Red Hat solutions in all projects of my clients.

This decision was crucial for my career and for the IT environment of the clients who worked as using the Red Hat Certified skills, along with the knowledge acquired in training Red Hat, I kept an innovative approach allowing expansion of the environment so creative.

For this, I had the opportunity to put into practice all the knowledge gained, is the simple installation of a server with RHEL kickstart an automated way, whether in high-availability environment with Cluster Suite. I had the opportunity to create the first pilot project in Brazil using Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, and can integrate with various systems and using RHDS and Satellite Server.

From simple to complex design, SELinux was instrumental in the improvement of safety systems. As for performance, we know that with the use of Red Hat Enterprise, we can extract the maximum performance of the servers, but when it was necessary to a specific setting, the knowledge acquired in training Red Hat Enterprise Performance Tuning were paramount.

Thus, the results have always been customer satisfaction, a safe environment and performing, and of course, all guaranteed by the largest open-source world, because with the use of subscriptions, always had the support of the support Red Hat.

So be creative and innovative, we have selected Red Hat solutions, where we can exercise the skills of Red Hat Certified exploring and developing new ideas, opening doors to new and better business opportunities.

Juan David Perez Orozco

Since 2000, I have been involved with Red Hat solutions, first as a customer using Fedora/Red Hat and now working for Summan, Red Hat Advanced Business and Certified Training Partner in Colombia. I personally believe that I have everything to win the Red Hat Professional of the Year award in 2012 due to my experience and career with Red Hat and also due to the impact of Red Hat business within Summan. I will explain how this dream started, how we continuously develop it and how big is nowadays the impact in our customers, Summan and my professional career.

In Colombia, there are just a few Red Hat Certified Engineers, and most of them, If not all, got their certification not so long ago. Seven years ago, I started to work for Summan, a company where its core business at that time was related to photocopy supplies. I developed the Infrastructure department based on linux as a core business for infrastructure solutions. Later on, I became Red Hat Certified Technician (RHCT) and months later, I became Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE), being the first one in Medellín, second largest city in Colombia. Starting 2010, I had active certifications as a RHCE, plus RH423, RHS333 and RH436 certificates of expertise. During the last months, I also acquired the RHCVA and RH401 certificate of expertise, becoming this way the first engineer certificated as RHCDS in the country.

In 2010 I was the solution architect and team leader of Summan, within the migration from SUN ONE Directory Server to Red Hat Directory Server for UNE EPM Telecomunicaciones, one of the top ISP's in the country. UNE has more than two million customers, and five million subscribed services, being the company with most IPTV subscribers in Latin America, and the only LTE 4G provider in Colombia. This project helped UNE to save up to 50% in maintenance and operational costs. In 2012, this project won the Red Hat Innovation Awards in the Optimized Systems category.

Thanks to Summan's vision of investing in Red Hat certifications and my experience, we have been able to move Summan's core business from photocopy supplies to infrastructure based on Red Hat. We have created marginal income by +60% since we started this new business model and I see lots of new opportunities coming for us.

As a conclusion, I have several years of experience in Red Hat technologies, I have helped to develop Summan as a leading company in Colombia as a Red Hat Partner, and have helped several companies to get a successful experience with Red Hat. Last but not the least, I helped UNE to win the Innovation Award Optimized Systems category in 2012. For those reasons, I consider myself as a strong competitor to win the Red Hat Professional of the Year award.

David Kramer

My Red Hat journey began in 2007 when I went to work for Red Hat. I was quickly submersed into Enterprise Linux and achieved my first RHCE within 90 days. When I joined Mytrus in 2010, I had to build the infrastructure by myself and proved to the FDA, IRBs and our Sponsors that the Red Hat Ecosystem was enough to handle all requirements and compliance regulations. The business problem that Mytrus solution solves is simple, but has never been done before. With Clinical Trials costs at an all-time high and Pharmaceutical companies desperately needing to cut costs, Mytrus Direct-to-Patient Clinical Trial solution was ready to be unveiled to the Health Care Industry and reduce costs by 35%. Mytrus has developed a Platform-as-a-Service that gives our patients the ability to participate in Clinical Trials from their home using PCs, tablets and smartphone technology. As an RHCA, you cover all aspects of the infrastructure stack from Virtualization strategy to service redundancy to storage to Systems Management.

Since I was the only systems engineer building the solution, it made sense to leverage Rackspace's managed hosting environment so I could architect the hardware infrastructure and have them maintain the physical aspect. This left me with designing a robust solution to handle the Network Change Control required in an FDA environment. For this I leveraged the Red Hat package ecosystem consisting of RHN, EPEL, Zend and a custom yum repository. Next was maintaining system's state consistency across all environments, from Rackspace to local sandbox instances running on many platforms. For this I leveraged Puppet and mCollective from EPEL. Puppet provided the configuration consistency combined with md5 checksum outputs that are used for traceability in FDA/Sponsor audits. mCollective gave me the Server Orchestration with several custom facts to control all the environments. Although Puppet and mCollective are extremely powerful tools, I still needed a build/application deployment tool that could work across all instances (Private Cloud and developer/QA sandboxes). I wrote a custom Perl program that was tightly integrated with Puppet and mCollective. I developed a build tool that contains approximately 20 build targets to handle all environments and build variants for deploying web content and database changes, providing FDA level audit logs. My RHCE taught me the basics for setting up FDA audit level secure Network Services such as HTTPS and SFTP.

My RHCA taught me the larger picture of Enterprise Architecture and how important consistency across System images is vital to maintaining Network Change Control and how redundancy is key to maintaining data integrity and high availability. My previous experience allowed me to have the understanding of having a robust build system and how to leverage Red Hat Ecosystem to get the tools needed (RHN, Puppet, mCollective, PERL) to achieve the implementation of this platform by myself. Today, Mytrus, Inc. is a first space mover in the HealthCare Clinical Trials industry and is the first ever FDA/Sponsor approved clinical trial and was launched on an Open Source stack running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Suraj Kumar

I have been working in the broadcasting industry from very young age. As the broadcast system engineer I have been managing, 24 x 7, a very large broadcast head-end setup for the delivery of contents, services and value added services for that. It has dependencies of software and many hardware parts. After clearing my RHCE, I decided to migrate all our win systems to linux, which is more flexible for changing sysconfig, multiprocessing and configuration of new systems within it. By doing this, we reduced the number of running systems, which eventually reduced consumption of electricity and CO2. Also, it has helped to monitor our system through network connected devices on the go and provide more security within our network. I am working on a plan to move everything to the cloud one day.