Red Hat has just concluded its 2013 Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) Partner Conference in Madrid, giving Red Hat a perfect opportunity to honour many of its industry partners in the company of their peers with our Red Hat EMEA Partner Award.

Now in its fifth year, the Red Hat EMEA Partner Awards recognise the achievements of its partners over the past year, and their on-going commitment to collaboration with Red Hat.

The following categories and winners were recognised at this year's event:

• Distributor of the Year: Avnet Technology Solution (TS), Spain
• Middleware Partner of the Year: Fritz & Macziol, Germany
• Stronger Together Award: Softcat, UK
• Innovation Solution of the Year: Accenture, Italy
• Platform Partner of the Year: LinuxIT, UK
• Cloud Partner of the Year: Ixonos  Oy, Finland

Winner of the Distributor of the Year accolade, Avnet Technology Solutions’ productive relationship with Red Hat has coincided with its repositioning as one of the leading datacentre distributors in EMEA. Avnet TS is a leading global value-added distributor of enterprise-computing, components, and subsystems software – connecting its partners to more customers and solutions, and offering the right combination of resources  to generate new revenue opportunities.

With an on-going commitment to its work with Red Hat, Avnet TS has built a comprehensive proposition for its customers. Its offering incorporates the entire datacentre infrastructure stack which assists customers in identifying and deploying appropriate datacentre solutions.

Likewise, the Middleware Partner of the Year award winner, Fritz & Macziol of Germany, an integrated enterprise computing hardware and software services provider, has a trusted strategic relationship with Red Hat in terms of management support and with a strong focus on Red Hat JBoss Middleware. Fritz & Macziol actively pursues middleware opportunities in order to deliver  new business opportunities for Red Hat.

The Red Hat EMEA Partner Awards highlight significant contributions to important areas of technology industry; and this is certainly true for the winner of Platform Partner of the Year: the UK open source software specialists, LinuxIT. A revitalised LinuxIT service was launched in January 2013, following a period of focused innovation that has resulted in a strengthening of its relationship with Red Hat. LinuxIT pioneered the use of enterprise-class open source software, in particular Red Hat solutions, into public sector organisations in the UK. LinuxIT expects to continue to create considerable opportunities for Red Hat – particularly in markets with a challenging history of resource investment.

"In an ever more competitive and evolving technology environment, strong business partners are essential. The Red Hat EMEA Partner Awards were created to acknowledge the strength of our partners’ collaborative cultures and what we can achieve by working together," said Petra Heinrich, vice president, Partners and Alliances, EMEA, Red Hat. "We also believe in the importance of celebrating innovation and strive towards market development that generates mutual benefits."

Red Hat’s belief in nurturing strong collaborations inspired the Stronger Together Award category. This year’s winner is British partner, Softcat, which is one of Red Hat’s largest hosting partners in the UK; it also works with Red Hat on traditional platform sales. Softcat’s comprehensive understanding of the Red Hat portfolio is enabling it to educate customers on the value of Red Hat’s offerings.

The Cloud Partner of the Year 2013 award went to Ixonos Oy in Finland, the wireless mobile solutions specialists and multi-channel online services and applications provider. The collaboration between Red Hat and Ixonos has seen the development of the Ixonos Elastic CloudTM – the first Red Hat Certified Cloud  Provider in northern Europe – an example of the creativity that has made Ixonos Finland a key partner in the Finnish market over the past three years. Elastic CloudTM is a scalable, robust, and secure solution optimized for global deployments of online services and applications.
 
In a similar vein, the Innovation Solution of the Year award went to Accenture, Italy, the management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company  whose work has done much to mature the enterprise ready open source market by investing in, and demonstrating the worth of Red Hat JBoss Middleware.

We congratulate all our 2013 EMEA Partner Award winners.