We at Red Hat love to talk about how open source technologies and Red Hat solutions help companies around the world innovate and excel. Every now and then, though, it's nice to talk about – and be recognized for – our own innovation. Just recently Red Hat was awarded a 2016 Omega Award for Sustained Innovation from ACG Research, an analyst and consulting firm that focuses on the service providers' networking and the telecom industry.

Red Hat received the award for innovation in open computing for cloud and network functions virtualization (NFV) – solutions built on a subscription-based, open source business model and the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system.

In press release announcing the award, ACG Research points to the significant growth in the past decade of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, as well as Red Hat's track record as a prominent contributor to the OpenStack cloud computing platform for the past five years. "In the past two years, it has become the most prominent open source distribution for OpenStack in NFV in the service provider market," the press release notes. "In addition to Red Hat's OpenStack contributions, Red Hat has been making substantial contributions to open source efforts toward orchestration via the Ansible open source community, and toward continuous innovation via its OpenShift devops platform," the release says.

The press release also points to the collaborations Red Hat has forged with other vendors. Red Hat OpenStack Platform is now included as a partner offering in Cisco, Dell EMC, Ericsson, HPE, NEC and Nokia cloud and NFV solution offerings.

The Omega Award recognizes excellence in product innovation, message marketing in HotSeat, Whiteboard and Spotlight Innovation videos. Awards are determined by customer ratings, video views and feedback from service providers, enterprises and the financial community. The Omega Award also recognizes operational excellence. Vendors winning this award demonstrate operational excellence and sustainability as measured by ACG's financial vendor index.