A few weeks ago at our 2016 North America Partner Conference in New Orleans, we reaffirmed our commitment to helping partners navigate the transition companies are facing as they embrace cloud computing. Coming off of that energizing event, we're proud to share some new industry recognition our partner program and organization has received.

For the fourth consecutive year, Red Hat has been awarded a 5-Star rating in the CRN 2016 Partner Program Guide. CRN describes this annual guide as a definitive listing of technology vendors that provide service solutions to the IT channel. The 5-Star Partner Program Guide rating recognizes an elite subset of companies that offer solution providers the best partnering elements in their channel programs.

When compiling the list, CRN assesses each vendor’s application based on investments in program offerings, partner profitability, partner training, education and support, marketing programs and resources, sales support, and communication. The 2016 Partner Program Guide is featured in the April issue of CRN and online at www.CRN.com/ppg2016.

We were also recently named to CRN’s Virtualization 50 list for the fourth time, which is great recognition of the work we've done to deliver a top-performing, enterprise-class open source virtualization platform. The Virtualization 50 is designed to help solution providers identify and evaluate virtualization solutions that enable them to modernize their datacenters while leveraging existing investments and building a foundation for the future. CRN said:

"Red Hat continues to be a major force in the virtualization market, challenging VMware with Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and building a strong software-defined storage presence. The company in 2015 expanded its capabilities to work with Linux-ready containers, as well as in software-defined storage based on its Ceph and Gluster technologies."

Both of these honors come on the heels of four of our channel leaders being named to CRN’s 2016 Channel Chiefs list - Margaret-Ann Bolton, senior director, Global Partner Marketing; Mark Enzweiler, senior vice president, Global Channel Sales and Alliances; D. Robert Martin, vice president, North American Partner Sales; and Stephen Mungall, director, Global Channel Sales.