We're pleased to share the winners of our annual Red Hat EMEA Partner Awards. Now in its seventh year, the Red Hat EMEA Partner Awards recognise the achievements our partners have brought to the Red Hat ecosystem over the past year, and their ongoing commitment to further develop open source technology.
 
Winners were recognised in the following categories at this year's event:
 
  • Distributor of the year: Avnet (IT + DE)
  • Datacenter infrastructure partner of the year: Sabeo (IE)
  • Stronger together: Softcat/Tier 2/LinuxIT (UK)
  • Cloud infrastructure partner of the year: T-Systems (DE)
  • Innovation solution: Accenture (IT)
  • Middleware partner of the year: Atos (DE) and R2M (SE)
 
Winner of the Distributor of the Year accolade, global value-added distributor Avnet has expanded its Red Hat business in both Germany and Italy, and proactively supported Red Hat and our partners through strong business engagement throughout the sales cycle.
 
As our Datacenter infrastructure partner of the year, Sabeo, a company that designs and supports mission-critical ICT infrastructure solutions to public and private organisations, has been instrumental in identifying opportunities in Ireland to introduce new technologies such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform and OpenShift. Sabeo has been a key driver for Red Hat business in Ireland for several years, building a strong client base and consistently attracting many attendees to its quarterly Red Hat events.
 
Red Hat’s belief in nurturing strong partnerships inspired the Stronger Together awards. This year’s winners are British partners Softcat (a leading provider of IT infrastructure to the corporate and public sectors), Tier 2 (an expert in creating enterprise-class solutions that can automate complex business processes) and LinuxIT (a UK open source software specialists). During the past year, these partners have collaborated on projects, bringing added value to open source and the Red Hat partner ecosystem.
 
The Cloud Infrastructure Partner of the year award went to T-Systems in Germany, a pan-European integration and managed service provider of datacentres and connectivity options for public sector, midmarket, and large enterprise customers. T-System has been working with Red Hat to offer vertical-ready cloud services with OpenShift, our Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering. T-System is a Red Hat Certified Cloud and Service Provider, delivering enterprise customer benefits such as increased speed of deployment for proof of concepts and reduction in the initial investment required to test cutting edge technologies.
 
The Innovation Solution of the Year award went to Accenture Italy, a management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company, which is working on innovative OpenShift-based projects with its customers.
 
In addition to the above categories, we want to recognize Atos and R2M for supporting Red Hat’s Middleware business. Atos has demonstrated significant middleware skill and substantial consulting, system integration and reselling capabilities to become a leading Red Hat middleware partner in Germany. Similarly, with in-depth knowledge of the public and banking sectors in Sweden, R2M has helped Red Hat to become a strategic supplier with several public sector customers in the region.
 
Red Hat remains deeply committed to nurturing our strategic and diverse partner ecosystem. We want to thank our valued partners, who have been instrumental in extending the reach of Red Hat solutions across EMEA.
 
The Red Hat EMEA Partner Awards were presented during the Red Hat EMEA Partner Conference 2015, Frankfurt, on 7th October.