Red Hat Premier Business Partners Help European Customers Embark on Cloud Projects

London, UK– March 13th, 2012– Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today highlighted the capabilities offered by its local virtualization-specialized Premier Business Partners focused around enabling end customers to lay a solid foundation for their future cloud plans. This follows from the January 2012 launch of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0, a compelling open virtualization alternative that offers leading performance, scalability, security, manageability and cost benefits.

Red Hat Premier Business Partners provide benefits to those Red Hat customers and prospects who are exploring open source virtualization technology by providing a local resource with Red Hat-certified expertise to guide, recommend and advise on virtualization and cloud deployments and plans. As the footprint of Red Hat’s customers expands globally, this specialised technology accreditation has become an important accolade for those partners that want to grow and develop alongside Red Hat as it invests in Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization technology and continues to enhance capital and operational efficiency for customers.

Successful virtualization deployments lay the foundation for cloud computing strategies and many enterprises have embraced an open source approach with its associated flexibility and cost effectiveness. Based on the open source Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 offers an open and interoperable solution without the lock-in of proprietary platforms. Partners who have achieved Red Hat’s virtualization specialization status work closely with customers to help enable a successful on ramp to virtualization and cloud computing, adoption and training.

“Sabeo Technologies is a long term Red Hat partner.  Over the course of our relationship, we have worked closely together to ensure that customers have access to technology that directly meets organisational goals, including local support and product solution expertise,” said John Long, CTO Sabeo. “We were determined to achieve Red Hat Virtualization Specialization status as the demand for Open Source Virtualization has increased in Ireland, and we wanted to ensure we had the specialist knowledge to serve these new and existing customers.” 

“Thanks to our close partnership with Red Hat, we have opportunities to learn about their product roadmaps and future development plans and able to provide customers with a strategic alternative to proprietary virtualization technologies,” said Robin Porter, Business Development Manager at Quru. “The recent launch of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 is particularly exciting and we look forward to bringing major product developments to our customer base over the next few months.”

“The past 12 months have seen a surge of customers enquiring about, and implementing, virtualization technology,” said Simon Mitchell, Executive Director – Sales at LinuxIT. “Open source and open standards are increasingly a part of organisations’ technology plans and as such our partnership with Red Hat puts us in the perfect position to provide solutions for an enterprise’s exact needs.”

Petra Heinrich, vice president, Partners & Alliances, EMEA at Red Hat provides insight into the key role played by the Premier Business Partners with Virtualization Specialization programme: “Our Premier Business Partners are intrinsic to our customers’ success.  The enthusiasm of our Virtualization Specialists is testament to the industry interest for agile, flexible and cost-effective technology outside of proprietary solutions and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 offers enterprises around the world a true strategic alternative. We look forward to working with customers and partners as we move into an exciting time in our Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization lifecycle.”

For more information about Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, visit www.redhat.com/rhev.

To download a free, fully supported 60-day evaluation of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, visit www.redhat.com/rhev3.

For more news about Red Hat, visit www.redhat.com.  For more news, more often, visit www.press.redhat.com.

About Red Hat, Inc.
Red Hat, the world's leading provider of open source solutions and an S&P 500 company, is headquartered in Raleigh, NC with more than 70 offices spanning the globe. Red Hat provides high-quality, affordable technology with its operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, together with cloud, virtualization, management, storage and service-oriented architecture (SOA) solutions, including Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and JBoss Enterprise Middleware. Red Hat also offers support, training and consulting services to its customers worldwide. Learn more: http://www.redhat.com.

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